Arcadia (play)
Arcadia is a 1993 stage play written by English playwright Tom Stoppard, which explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from "one of the most significant contemporary playwrights" in the English language.[1] In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written.[2]
Arcadia
13 April 1993
- Lyttelton Theatre
- Royal National Theatre
- London
English
History, science, philosophy, mathematics, love, death
A Derbyshire country estate in both the past (1809, 1812) and "the present"
Genre[edit]
Arcadia is, on the surface, somewhere between a tragedy and a comedy. It involves some elements of classical tragedy – "noble" characters and the audience's foreknowledge of Thomasina's death – but the predominant element is comedy, in the way that the characters interact with each other and in their witty, epigrammatic dialogue.[6]
Style[edit]
Jim Hunter writes that Arcadia is a relatively realistic play, compared to Stoppard's other works, though the realism is "much enhanced and teased about by the alternation of two eras".[10] The setting and characters are true-to-life, without being archetypal. It is comprehensible: the plot is both logical and probable, following events in a linear fashion. Arcadia's major deviation from realism, of course, is in having two plotlines that are linear and parallel. Thus we see Thomasina deriving her mathematical equations to describe the forms of nature;[11] we later see Val, with his computer, plotting them to produce the image of a leaf.[12]
Language[edit]
The language of Arcadia switches between the colloquialisms of early 19th-century England and those of modern England. Stoppard's language reflects his periods, historical and modern, and he uses speech patterns and lexicons in keeping with his characters.
But his is a stylised dialogue, conveying the "look and feel" of the past as perceived by the modern audience.[13] Still, it has sufficient latitude in register to make plain the relationships between the characters. For example, Septimus, after failing to deflect a question from Thomasina with a joke, bluntly explains to his pupil the nature of "carnal embrace"[14] – but this bluntness is far removed from that with which he dismisses Chater's self-deceiving defence of his wife's reputation (which, Septimus says, "could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry"). With Lady Croom, in responding to his employer's description of Mrs. Chater as a "harlot", Septimus delicately admits that "her passion is not as fixed" as one might wish.[15][16]
In the modern sequences, the dialogue is more realistic.[6] But Bernard consciously assumes some stylisation of language: He rehearses his public lecture in heightened, flamboyant rhetoric;[17] and he unleashes a polemic against Valentine's scientific thought (describing the concept as no more than "performance art"), not from spite but for "recreation".[18][19]
The play's scientific concepts are set forth primarily in the historical scenes, where Thomasina delivers her precocious (or even anachronistic) references to entropy, the deterministic universe and iterated equations in improvised, colloquial terms.[9] In the modern era, Valentine explains the significance of Thomasina's rediscovered notebook with careful detail, reflecting Stoppard's research into his play's scientific materials.[20][21]
Consciously echoed phrases, across the time frames, help to unify the play. For example, Chloe asks Valentine if "the future is all programmed like a computer", and whether she is the first to think that theory discredited "because of sex".[22] Thomasina has been there before: "If you could stop every atom in its position and direction ... you could write the formula for all the future," she tells Septimus, then adds, "Am I the first person to have thought of this?"[23] The difference is significant: Chloe's intuitive version allows for the effects of chaos, illustrating Stoppard's theme of the interdependence of science and art, and between professional and amateur thinking.[24]
Contextual information[edit]
In Arcadia, Stoppard presents his audience with several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts. He also uses these theories and ideas to illuminate relationships among his characters, adding to their poignancy.
One of the play's main thematic concepts is chaos theory. Paul Edwards, in his essay "Science in Hapgood and Arcadia", notes that "chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. [...] It is 'asymmetric' (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy".[29]
John Fleming, in his book Stoppard's Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos, makes a similar observation. "Deterministic chaos", he writes, "deals with systems of unpredictable determinism. ... [T]he uncertainty does not result in pure randomness, but rather in complex patterns. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behavior." But as systems respond to variations in input, they become more random or chaotic. "Surprisingly, within these random states, windows of order reappear. [...] There is order in chaos – an unpredictable order, but a determined order nonetheless, and not merely random behavior."[30]
Closely related scientific and mathematical concepts in Arcadia are the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. Fleming describes these two principles. "Entropy is the measure of the randomness or disorder of a system. The law of increase of entropy states that as a whole, the universe is evolving from order to disorder. This relates to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that heat spontaneously flows in only one direction, from hotter to colder. Since these equations, unlike Newton's laws of motion, do not go backward and forward, there is an 'arrow of time' that points toward the eventual 'heat death' of the universe."[31]
In Arcadia, Stoppard uses all these concepts to reveal that "there is an underlying order to seemingly random events." The characters discuss these topics, while their interactions reflect them. Often these discussions themselves create order and connections beneath the appearance of disunity. For example, both Thomasina's theories on heat and Valentine's search for a "signal" in the "noise" of the local grouse population refer to the physicist Joseph Fourier and his development of the Fourier transform, which he first used to analyze the physics of heat transfer but has since found wide application. Though the characters would seem to have little in common, their work in fact relates to the same topic.[32]
Some ideas in the play recall Goethe's novella Elective Affinities: Stoppard's characters "Thomasina" and "Septimus" have parallels in Goethe's "Ottilie" and "Eduard", and the historical section of Stoppard's play is set in 1809, the year of Goethe's novella.[33] Among other parallels, the older work takes the theory of affinity between chemical elements as a metaphor for ineluctable, inevitable "human chemistry" in the same way as Stoppard makes use of the force of determinism acting on his characters.[34][35] A feature of both works is the preoccupation with remodelling country house landscapes; Goethe's young character "Ottilie" (the counterpart to Thomasina) dies as an indirect result of this.[33]
Reception[edit]
The Times, reviewing the first production in 1993, praised it as a "perfect marriage of ideas and high comedy".[45] But for some, the ideas overwhelmed the comedy: "[T]oo clever by about two-and-three-quarters," noted critic Jack Tinker. "One comes away instructed with more than one can usefully wish to know."[46] After an eight-month run at the National, the play's transfer to the West End gave an opportunity for re-appraisal. The Daily Telegraph critic commented: "I have never left a play more convinced that I had just witnessed a masterpiece".[47]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the play as "Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion".[40] But other New York reviews were mixed or unfavourable, complaining of the anachronisms and lack of realism.[48] The production left John Simon of New York Magazine with the view that "Stoppard overdoes it…Arcadia makes better reading than seeing".[49] The book review website The Pequod rated the play a 10.0 (out of 10.0), saying "Arcadia combines an astonishing range of disparate elements — romance, humor, tragedy, sorrow, scientific history, and even gardening — into an entirely unique work of art."[50]
The 2009 London revival prompted more critics to laud the play as "Stoppard's finest work".[51] Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian that the play "gets richer with each viewing. ... [T]here is poetry and passion behind the mathematics and metaphysics."[52] Johann Hari of The Independent speculated that Arcadia would be recognised "as the greatest play of its time".[53]
The 2011 Broadway staging met with a mixed reception. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the production "a half-terrific revival of Mr. Stoppard's entirely terrific Arcadia", noting that "several central roles are slightly miscast", and "some of the performances from the Anglo-American cast are pitched to the point of incoherence."[54] Similar concerns were raised by critics from the New York magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Time Out New York and Bloomberg News.[55]