Arcadia: A Play by Tom Stoppard Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Arcadia: A Play
Book Review: Worth more than one reading
Summary: 5 Stars
This funny play about important things takes place in a single room, but shuttles between 1809 and 1989, ending with the two sets of characters, together but mutually invisible, revealing to us a sweet sadness.
Book Review: Wry commentary on human nature
Summary: 4 Stars
One of my classes this semester is a playwriting course, so I turned to Stoppard to give me some inspiration and guidance in the process of creation. I've not seen much Stoppard performed--only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Rough Crossing--but I liked both of those very much. A classmate recommended this play, and it was in my AlexLit recommendation list as well.After reading it, I am not surprised. The basic plot is similar in many ways to A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I waxed effusive about way back in Installment 7. In 1809 in a country house in Derbyshire, Septimus Hodge is tutoring a young woman named Thomasina. In the modern day, some of Hodge's letters and effects are being studied by some academics, one of whom is determined that Lord Byron was present and is responsible for two scurrilous reviews in the Picadilly Review. The academic, of course, hopes to make his career on this.
Stoppard and Byatt part ways, though, in the meaning that they attach to the machinations of academics trying to discover the "truth" of the past. Byatt's entire book was a study of the word "possess," and what it meant both for her fictious poets and the modern day literary detectives. Stoppard, however, is exploring a difference in temperament between the times, but how sex is and has always been a disruptive force. It's a wry commentary on human nature.
Book Review: Yesterday's News
Summary: 2 Stars
Arcadia dually covers a historical event turgid with substance and contemporary historians who would wish to piecemeal it back together into the whole that it was. In reading it, we find that something is lost and regained. The emotional content of the past, in its particularity, is lost, but it remains the subject of, and emerges around, the heat of the present; the gaps are filled in, old controversies become renewed, and old ideas are reborn in contemporary counterparts. In that sense, Arcadia is a masterwork. Stoppard goes so far as to craft an extraordinarily well-written drama out of platonic and romantic ideas that are so banal and intellectualy innocuous simply because they, themselves, have long since passed their due.
I believe that Stoppard writes very well, and Arcadia is another exemplification of that fact, but I can't believe that anyone will be reading him in fifty years. His modern acclaim can only be a testament to his reaffication of already accepted modes of dramatic structure and content. He is simply the prophet of our dramatic yesterday.
Book Review: excellent!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have never read, or seen a more wonderful play!! It contains everything one could ever want-conflict, gardens, sex, love, romance. It's an intellectual party for all of your senses. I highly reccomend it! Enjoy!!Book Review: heavenly indeed
Summary: 5 Stars
read this book. if you like tom stoppard, if you like math, if you like sex, or chaos theory, or history and archeaology, if you like literature, or love or music or dancing, read this book. thanks to stoppard, we see how all these things come together, through a witty exchange of dialogue that is both comic and tragic, but ultimately a moving and thought provoking literary masterpiece.