Arcadia - Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was glamorous, charismatic and brilliant, and his plays are among the finest written in English since the Second World War. Perhaps his most accomplished work is Arcadia, first performed in 1993, with a stellar cast including Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendal, Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy. The play contains two separate groups of people, one from the early 1800s, and the other from the present day, but performing in the same room in a country house in England. Stoppard explores a multitude of themes including mathematics and chaos theory, landscape gardening, entropy, the nature of knowledge, and literary criticism. It is dazzling, funny, witty and deeply moving, and the connections between the two groups are revealed as the play unfolds. But is it too clever by half? Can Stoppard's unashamedly intellectual exploration of ideas come across as all artifice and no heart? What role does Byron play in all this? And has there ever been a better name for a tortoise than Plautus? Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss Stoppard's great play and celebrate his long and distinguished life.