Arcadia (piece)

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Arcadia (ger .: Arcadia ) is a play by Tom Stoppard from 1993.

The play premiered on April 13, 1993 at the Royal National Theater in London.

content

The play takes place in England between 1809 and 1812 on the manor house of the Croom family, which belongs to the English gentry . Sidley Park is to be transformed into a romantic landscape garden to suit the taste of the times. Between the people involved, Lord Byron , the tutor Septimus Hodge, Lady Croom and the young Thomasina Coverly, a precocious mathematical-physical genius - all of whom are highly educated and love intellectual debates - a firework of ingenious dialogues emerges. The discussion is about problems of the landscape garden, free will, scientific progress or the right interpretation of the enigmatic saying Et in Arcadia Ego in Poussin's pictures , to which Stoppard alludes in the title of his piece. Sexual attractions arise between the participants, and intrigues are spun that end with one of the participants dying in a duel and Lord Byron escaping from England.

Towards the end of the 20th century, two people in the same place, a passionate landscape gardener and an ambitious university lecturer in English literature, quarrel over the reason why Byron's hasty departure to the continent. The lecturer claims that Byron shot a jealous rival in a duel, while his colleague cannot follow this line of argument and eventually exposes him as a dubious and negligent scientist.

shape

The piece is divided into seven scenes. The action takes place on two different time levels between 1809 and 1812 and towards the end of the 20th century, but the setting is always the same, namely the winter garden and the garden room of the Sidley Park country house.

people

19th century
  • Thomasina Coverly, 13 years old, later 16
  • Septimus Hodge, her teacher, 22, later 25
  • Jellaby, a middle-aged butler
  • Ezra Chater, a poet, Jan.
  • Richard Noakes, a middle-aged landscape architect
  • Lady Croom, mid thirties
  • Capt. Brice, RN, mid thirties
  • Augustus Coverly, 15
20th century
  • Hannah Jarvis, a writer and historian, in her late thirties
  • Chloë Coverly, 18
  • Bernard Nightingale, a historian, in his late thirties
  • Valentine Coverly, 25 to 30 years old
  • Gus Coverly, Jan.

reception

The first performance of the play at the Royal National Theater in 1993 under the direction of Trevor Nunn was celebrated with great praise by the English press. The Guardian advertised a re-evaluation of Stoppard's work on both sides and praised him as “a writer with fear of cosmic disorder and hunger for a kind of post-Christian value system”. The Times published a “Theater Goer's Guide” explaining the main physical terms Arcadia alludes to.

In its review of the play on April 19, 1993, Der Spiegel praised Stoppard's remarkable ability to "think up any number of upscale jokes" and highlighted the verbal duels, which "recall the best British theater tradition". All of the characters in the play are "well educated, grotesquely witty and witty to the point of madness." In his play, Stoppard succeeds in staging the “sexual greed behind the masks” and the struggle “between body and convention, carried out through the means of conversation” in an entertaining way.

In the review in the Observer of April 18, 1993, Arcadia is seen as possibly the most subtle piece of Stoppard (“may be his finest work to date”) and emphasizes his humanistic instinct as a writer (“Stoppard's humanist instinct as a writer”).

The Washington Post , on the other hand, in its theater review of December 20, 1996, criticized the author's lack of dramatic ability in the initial design of the conversations, but saw an emotional deepening in the further course of the work (“There's not much dramatic force to their conversations. But the play deepens emotionally as the evening goes on ").

In 2006 the piece was shortlisted for the “best popular science book of all time”, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain selected.

On the occasion of a new release in 2009, the Daily Telegraph compared in its Internet edition of June 6, 2009 Stoppard's work with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and emphasized the humor, elegance and sheer exuberance ("humor, elegance and sheer exuberance") of Wildes Comedy in no way inferior.

On July 15, 2009, the Independent praised the play as "the greatest love story on the British stage for decades" and considered Arcadia to be one of the most important English plays of our time .

In its review of a Broadway performance on March 17, 2011, the New York Times praised the author's ingenuity and ability to transform time (“Stoppard's time-traveling craftsmanship”) as well as the “emotional depth” of the piece (“emotional depth "), which expresses the insatiable human urge to acquire knowledge, be it in a sexual, mathematical, historical or metaphysical sense (" the unquenchable human urge to acquire knowledge, whether carnal, mathematical, historical or metaphysical ").

Lyn Gardner also emphasized in her theater review in the Guardian of April 20, 2014 that Stoppard's work was regularly and rightly described by the critics as “one of the great plays of the last 50 years and the undisputed masterpiece of the author” (“one of the great plays of the last 50 years, and the playwright's undisputed masterpiece ”). In the game full of ideas, the classical with the romantic, science with poetry and the past with the present are contrasted in order to fathom what makes us human and what shapes our determination to dance on despite the looming darkness and coldness of the universe ("Exploring what it is that makes us human and our determination to keep dancing even as the darkness gathers and the universe grows cold").

English editions (selection)

  • Tom Stoppard: Arcadia . Faber and Faber, London 1993.
  • Tom Stoppard: Arcadia . Samuel French, New York and London 2011, ISBN 978-0573695667 .

German editions

literature

  • John Fleming: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia . Continuum Modern Theater Guides, London et al. 2009 (reprint 2011), ISBN 978-0826496218 .
  • Jim Hunter: Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia (Faber Critical Guides). Faber & Faber, London 2000, ISBN 0-571-19782-5 , pp. 155-228.
  • Anja Müller: Representations: a study of the intertextual and intermedia game by Tom Stoppard's Arcadia . Knowledge Verl. Trier, Trier 2001, ISBN 978-3-88476-420-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information in the review of the work in Spiegel from April 19, 1993, online Witzig bis zum Wahn . Retrieved April 15, 2017.
  2. ↑ Cf. Witzig bis delusional . In: Der Spiegel, April 19, 1993. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  3. ↑ See Head-scratching in Stoppard's Arcadia . In: Observer , April 18, 1993. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  4. ↑ See Stoppard's Coolly Clever 'Arcadia' . In: Washington Post , December 20, 1996. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  5. ↑ The Guardian: Levi's memoir beats Darwin to win science book title.
  6. ↑ See Arcadia, at Duke of York's Theater - review . In: Daily Telegraph , June 6, 2009. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  7. ↑ Cf. Is Tom Stoppard's Arcadia the greatest play of our age? . In: The Independent , May 21, 2009. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  8. ↑ See The 180-Year Itch, Metaphysically Speaking . In: New York Times , March 17, 2011. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  9. ↑ See Arcadia review - Tom Stoppard's lofty drama given a flaming warmth . In: The Guardian , April 20, 2014. Retrieved July 15, 2017.