Word: stoppards
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This time Stoppard climaxes a splendid intellectual farrago with a poignant image of two couples dancing, literally and metaphysically, in the dark. One embraces in the dawn of the romantic 19th century, the other at the twilight of the nihilistic 20th. Both are confronting the little tragedy of death and the grand tragedy of entropy, the inevitable darkening and chilling of the universe. This dual moment, and the glittering double story that precedes it, are full of more affection and compassion than Stoppard has ever shown before...
...story of Arcadia is, like most Stoppard plots, hard to summarize in much less than the three hours it takes on the stage. The action in both centuries unfolds in a stately home, a symbol at once of Britain's continuity and of its decay. The 19th century story focuses on a startlingly gifted 13-year-old girl and her tutor, a seemingly shallow, smug university man a decade older. The 20th century story focuses on the present generation of the girl's landed family and on two biographers who are probing Byron's connections to the house, investigating...
...deductions made about them in the present. At a deeper level the piece is a meditation on the chanciness of fame and the meaning of genius, strongly suggesting that the 19th century girl was a considerably greater figure than her celebrated house guest, Lord Byron. At its most profound, Stoppard's elegant dialogue addresses the competing principles of order and disorder in the universe...
...live comfortably within the same space, beguilingly designed by Mark Thompson. Nunn evokes exquisite performances, notably from Felicity Kendal as one of the 20th century scholars, and from Emma Fielding and Rufus Sewell as the brilliant girl and her initially charmed, ultimately doomed tutor. As usual in a Stoppard play, the true star is Stoppard, and he has never burned brighter or more kindly...
MUSIC A luminous CD set affirms the Beach Boys' place in pop history. THEATER Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is the best British play in years. BOOKS David Halberstam engrossingly surveys The Fifties. A brilliant, flawed novel by Richard Powers. CINEMA Rookie of the Year strikes out. SHOW BUSINESS Disney offers an uninspired stage extravaganza...