Marc's Reviews > Arcadia

“Let's danse…”
A very ingenious play, chock full of themes and references to scientific and cultural-historical phenomena. The central theme is, of course, the apparent contradiction between chaos and order, which turns out to be none. Also past and future, Enlightenment and Romanticism, love and hate do not appear to be separate extremes, but rather very complex interrelated phenomena. By playing on 2 fields, in two different time periods (early 19th and late 20th century), Stoppard manages to create a dynamic that continues to intrigue. After 1 reading you have barely reckognized a handful of the references. Naturally, this makes this comedy primarily an intellectual experiment, the moral of which is that chaos also has an underlying order. With the final scene, in which the protagonists in the two time periods dance with each other, Stoppard seems to shake off all the heavy-handed theories, as if he is sticking his tongue out at the reader/spectator. Again, ingeniously done, but whether it is also a successful play on stage seems to me to be a completely different question.