Tom Stoppard Is Gone. In ‘Arcadia,’ His Wit Still Sparkles.
Nytimes reports that a revival of Tom Stoppard’s "Arcadia," directed by Carrie Cracknell, opened Wednesday at the Old Vic in London and runs through March 21, arriving just two months after the playwright’s death at age 88. Widely regarded as Stoppard’s masterpiece — which premiered in 1993 — "Arcadia" links twin narratives set in the early 19th and late 20th centuries, staging a dialectical inquiry into subjects from algebra and thermodynamics to botany and computer algorithms and exploring binaries such as classical versus romantic temperaments and determinism versus free will.
The production pairs modern characters Hannah Jarvis (Leila Farzad) and Bernard Nightingale (Prasanna Puwanarajah) with 1809 figures including Lady Croom (Fiona Button), Thomasina (Isis Hainsworth) and Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane). Alex Earles’s in-the-round set centers on a revolving desk patterned with concentric circles beneath a constellation of illuminated orbs.