by Tom Stoppard
Award-winning author's play of Sex, Literature and Death at
Sidley Park
Reviewed by: Guy Brandon
About Guy Brandon
From the first page, it is clear that Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" is going
to be a masterpiece. It opens with an outrageous and hilarious sequence of
crossed lines, witticisms, double-entendres and bizarre mental segues, and
the same pace and dialogue are continued right to the end of the scene,
which sets the background and has the reader well and truly hooked.
The play is set in two time periods in the same room of a large Derbyshire
country house. The scenes move between the two alternately, and Stoppard
cleverly uses the same props in both settings as the parallel plotlines
evolve, the one tied up in the other. In the present-day strand, the
academic Bernard Nightingale is trying to unravel the evidence surrounding
the scandal that took place at Sidley Park early in the 19th century. 180
years earlier, thirteen year old Lady Thomasina Coverly is progressing very
rapidly in her education, her tutor Septimus Hodge is busy attracting offers
of duels surrounding the honour of an acquaintance's wife, his guest Lord
Byron is spreading his own share of havoc, and the gardens designed by
Capability Brown - including a rather popular gazebo - are about to be
renovated in a more Gothic style. Piece by piece, Nightingale
enthusiastically and with varying degrees of success untangles the puzzle.
Tom Stoppard's sophisticated play explores a number of ideas, from Newtonian
Physics to thermodynamics and chaos theory, the scientific versus the
artistic, and the detrimental effect that sexual attraction has on an
otherwise deterministic universe: "the attraction that Newton left out". It
is an extremely witty, complex and intelligent interplay of subjects,
sometimes poignant and always very entertaining.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Arcadia
Copyright © by Guy Brandon, 2002
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