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A review of Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

Award-winning author's play of Sex, Literature and Death at Sidley Park

Reviewed by: Guy Brandon
About Guy Brandon

Arcadia 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

Reviewed by Guy Brandon:
-- Koba the Dread - by Martin Amis
-- The Eagle's Shadow - by Mark Hertsgaard
-- Human Instinct - How our primeval impulses shape our modern lives - by Robert Winston
-- Hannibal - by Thomas Harris
-- Ender's Game - by Orson Scott Card
-- A Clockwork Orange - by Anthony Burgess
-- 2001: A Space Odyssey - by Arthur C. Clarke
-- Color: Stories from the Paintbox - by Victoria Finlay
-- Arcadia - by Tom Stoppard
-- Angry White Pyjamas - by Robert Twigger
-- Lord of the Rings - by J. R. R. Tolkien
-- The Matrix and Philosophy - by William Irwin









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