Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

by John Patrick Fleming

Tom Stoppard is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary British playwrights, a writer who has earned an intriguing mix of both critical and commercial success. Arcadia is considered by many critics to be Stoppard's masterpiece, a work that weds his love for words and ideas in his early career, with his emphasis on storytelling and emotional engagement in his later career.
With its engaging alteration between past and present Arcadia offers a comedic and entertaining exploration of chaos theory, entropy, the Second Law of thermodynamics, iterated algorithms, fractals, and other concepts culled from the realms of math and science.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theatre, Drama

134 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

JOHN FLEMING is Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at Texas State University, where he served as producer for Romulus Linney's adaptation of Going After Cacciato. In addition to teaching theatre history, Fleming is also a playwright, including the award-winning plays Transposing Shakespeare and The Two Lives of Napoleon Beazley.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good summary of the major themes of the play and the context in which Stoppard wrote it. The best parts are when he draws from interviews with Stoppard and earlier drafts of the play.