You might not believe this, but I don't actually blog every review of every Tom Stoppard play that on the boards everywhere in the world. Well, not quite.
Sometimes, though, a review captures the meaning and spirit of the play and I can't resist passing along the good words. Such is the cast with this review of Arcadia in The Irish Times.
Only Tom Stoppard could find the emotional core of his 1993 drama within a lament for the destruction of the ancient library of Alexandria. As the 19th-century child prodigy Thomasina rues the loss of innumerable Athenian holdings (“How can we sleep for grief?”), her tutor’s response comes close to encapsulating the invigorating appeal of Tom Stoppard’s extraordinary play.
“We shed as we pick up,” Septimus consoles, “like travellers who must carry everything in our arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” In Stoppard’s demanding and hugely rewarding drama of ideas, the characters who shed and those that pick up both inhabit a Derbyshire country estate, separated by two different centuries. [more]
