- Arcadia involves a lot of clever people who wittily discuss ideas and then hurry off to have sex with each other
- iterated algorithms, landscape gardening, Euclidian geometry, rice pudding and Newton's third law of thermodynamics
- Simply everybody loved this comedy of ideas when it opened at the National in 1993
- wise and yearning play spans the Georgian sublime and the disillusioned days of the last Tory government, spinning ideas about the shape of the universe and the needs of the heart
- Arcadia is a supreme play of ideas, sealing its classic status. Chaos theory, poetry, ethics, the end of history: they're all in there
- The play also has an aching emotional pull
- the way in which word and image work together, culminating in a wrenchingly beautiful final scene in which past and present-day couples waltz around each other, phantoms just a breath away from touch
- Arcadia tries to imagine what a careless paradise might look like, and which imagines the universe only to flirt with its disintegration
- set in a country house, and switching between its aristocratic inhabitants in the 19th century and nearly 200 years later
- is a literary puzzle interweaving so many themes (not to mention love affairs)
- there is poetry and passion behind the mathematics and metaphysics
- Stoppard opens up supposed collisions between science and literature, classicism and romanticism, deterministic and unpredictable theories of the universe
- one group of characters seeks to plot the future while the other tries to reconstruct the past
- past and present slowly converge
- science is instrinsic to the story, and itself a vehicle for emotion - Valentine trying to woo Hannah
- Thomasina and Septimus' relationship is both intellectual and erotic
- Lady Croom is a 19th aristocrat filled with hauteur and desire
- Thomasina spots the incompleteness of Isaac Newton’s laws of physics, Bernard unearths what he believes to be a dirty secret in the life of Byron
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