18 ms·
Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (2009)
- tarboreus 6y agoArcadia is one of the best contemporary works, period. Highly, highly recommended.
- cryptonector 6y agoTom Stoppard is an amazing playright. Arcadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are two of the greatest plays.
- sukilot 6y ago"Arcadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" is quite a Stoppardesque grammatical construction.
- leephillips 6y agoCurious coincidence to see this here. I happened to read this a few weeks ago. It’s a brilliant conception, hiliarious and passionate. Usually when math and physics rear their heads in a work of literature, I get ready to cringe. But not here. Nothing is gratuitous; everything has meaning.
- quercusa 6y agoMy wife dragged me to see Arcadia in 1995 (Stage Door Theatre, San Francisco) - I was mesmerized. Reading it is good; seeing it performed is much better.
- leephillips 6y agoWhile reading it I kept wondering how it would be staged, especially near the end, with the characters from different periods in the scene together. It seemed to me it would be really difficult to produce, but could be a wonderful theater experience if it were pulled off.
- cryptonector 6y agoThe staging I saw had it happen in one room, with a window into the yard.
- roperzh 6y agoAnother play from Tom Stoppard that I enjoyed is “Darkside”, combines Pink Floyd, Philosophy and humor.
- gumby 6y agoWe saw it in London he week it opened. I still don’t know how my wife managed that. I’m not normally a huge fan of the stage but I was captivated. Not a comedy per se, but some sly elements really made me laugh! Still a favorite today.
- cryptonector 6y agoNot a comedy, maybe, but uproarious at times for sure.
- DiffProg 6y agoAgreed. Every good serious story will have comedic elements to it.
- throwawaw 6y agoThis was the first play I ever read for fun (instead of for a class). I fell in love with it, and over the years I've re-read it several times. I don't know what it was -- it just bit me, somehow. Some theater company was performing it here in the bay area not too long ago, but at the time I was broke (and too old for the cheap "We must find a way to get young people to watch theater" tickets). Now I could afford it! But I guess there's not a lot of live theater going on at the moment...
- sgillen 6y agoIt’s the only modern play I was exposed to in an academic setting, so I think that is a good indication that it will stick around.
- senkora 6y agoArcadia is wonderful. We read it in a high school English class at my STEM-focused high school. The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had interesting implications for science. Arcadia is one such work because it talks about what knowledge is, why it matters, and how historians bring their own biases to interpreting the past. We see characters in the past do one thing and characters in the present misinterpret it several times. We see a child prodigy discover math concepts before anyone else, and then have a historian dismiss the evidence of that because she had the ideas “too early,” even though her discoveries were basic and from first principles. The historian is trying to prove his incorrect pet theory but is blind to something even more significant because he doesn’t expect it. (All of this is from memory years later) Other books we read in this class include A Canticle for Liebewitz and a book about Galileo whose name escapes me.
- Farnak 6y agoWas it the play "Life of Galileo"? That's a fascinating concept for a high school English class. Is it reasonable for you to dig up the entire reading list?
- senkora 6y agoIt was! I looked it up and the summary matches what I remember. I found the list, it may be missing some poems but this is largely what we covered: A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr Arcadia - Tom Stoppard Dulce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen Frankenstein - Mary Shelley Kindred - Octavia E. Butler Life of Galileo - Bertolt Brecht Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw Suicide in the Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King The Lady's Not for Burning - Christopher Fry The Mortal Immortal - Mary Shelley
- Farnak 6y agoAwesome, I haven't heard of half of this list. This will be great shelter-in-place reading.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
- dotsam 6y agoThere is an audio recording by L.A. Theatre Works https://beta.prx.org/stories/43614 https://beta.prx.org/stories/43614 and https://beta.prx.org/stories/43844 https://beta.prx.org/stories/43844
- 082349872349872 6y agoShepherds and the Third Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_in_Arcadia_ego#/media/File:Nicolas_Poussin_-_Et_in_Arcadia_ego_(deuxième_version).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_in_Arcadia_ego#/media/File:...