Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
9 Rating(s)
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Arcadia

Author: Tom Stoppard

Narrator: Kate Burton, Gregory Itzin, Full Cast

Unabridged: 2 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/15/2009


Synopsis

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia merges science with human concerns and ideals, examining the universe’s influence in our everyday lives and ultimate fates through relationship between past and present, order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. Set in an English country house in the year 1809-1812 and 1989, the play examines the lives of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier.

The New York Times calls Arcadia: “Tom Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date. A play of wit, intellect, language, brio and emotion,” and The Royal Institution of Great Britain calls it: “the best science book ever written.”

Includes an interview with Steven Strogatz, the author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos and professor at the Cornell University School of Theoretical and Applied Mathematics.

An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Kate Burton as Hannah
Mark Capri as Chater
Jennifer Dundas as Thomasina
Gregory Itzin as Bernard Nightingale
David Manis as Cpt. Brice
Christopher Neame as Noakes and Jellaby
Peter Paige as Valentine
Darren Richardson as Augustus
Kate Steele as Chloe
Serena Scott Thomas as Lady Croom
Douglas Weston as Septimus

Directed by John Rubinstein. Recorded at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

Arcadia is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. Major funding for the Relativity Series is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

Reviews

Enough people love this play that it presumably has some good qualities. But I just couldn't get past the snide, obnoxious characters, and the facile, frequently inaccurate treatment of science and math, which panders to the "science is just the product of fallible human impulses and, like, we don't......more

Goodreads review by Kelly

(view spoiler)[And after all that... it all ends in people waltzing, oblivious to it all going up in flames. I endlessly, endlessly love this play. (hide spoiler)]......more

Goodreads review by Roger

The Waltz of Time Reading Iain Pears' brilliant novel Arcadia just now, I wondered how it might have been influenced by Tom Stoppard's 1993 play of the same title, which has been described [in the article I shall cite below] as "maybe the greatest play of our age." Answer: very much, and yet hard......more

Goodreads review by Dave

Probably the most ambitious play (1993) from Tom Stoppard, taking place in one setting tacking back and forth between two centuries. The basic focus is on the relationship between science and art, between the rational and romantic, about chaos theory, and sex! It's erudite, drawing on scholarly sour......more