"Tonight is the press night for Arcadia's second major London revival at the playwright's home from home, The Old Vic where he made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. An extremely witty and intellectually dazzling masterpiece, the play in typical Stoppardian fashion examines man's drive to impose systems of order and disorder on the world, the dialectical tension that exists between art and science, sex, the laws of thermodynamics, chaos theory and landscape gardening amongst many other popular dinner table subjects."
"The play's narrative runs on two separate timelines in the same location eventually converging in a quantum mash-up as past and present collide. Set in Sidley Park, the country seat of the aristocratic Coverly family, the play opens in 1809. Lady Thomasina Coverly is a precocious 16-year-old visionary mathematician whose extraordinary mind predicts the second law of thermodynamics, fractals and chaos theory."
Arcadia intercuts two timelines—1809 and the early 1990s—both set at Sidley Park, the Coverly family estate. In 1809, 16-year-old Lady Thomasina Coverly displays visionary mathematical insight, anticipating concepts from thermodynamics, fractals and chaos theory, while tutoring and romantic entanglements dramatize class hierarchies and sexual rivalries. The later timeline follows modern Coverly siblings, including Valentine, a mathematical biology postgrad, investigating the estate's historical mysteries. Byron functions as an unseen influence. The narratives converge through intellectual and emotional collisions that examine humanity's impulse to impose order, the dialectic of art and science, and the interplay of knowledge, desire and landscape.
Read at London Unattached
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