ISBN: 0571169341 9780571169344

Category: Drama / General

Page count: 97

<p><b>Tom Stoppard's masterpiece, with a beautiful new cover.</b><br> <br> <i>Comparing what we're looking for misses</i> <i>the point. It's wanting to know that makes us</i> <i>matter. Otherwise we're going out the way</i> <i>we came in.</i><br> <br> <i>Arcadia</i> premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the <i>Evening Standard</i> Award for Best Play.<br> <br> '<b>It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take</b> <b>the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously.</b> It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are Romanticism, Classicism, and the meaning of life . . . <b>The stale cliché about Stoppard is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here - at the core of his best play - is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades.</b> Yes, the characters bond over ideas - but some of the most interesting people in life do just that. That would be enough to make <i>Arcadia</i> a masterpiece - but it is even more than that. <b>The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask.</b> How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain - not just of ourselves, but of our species?' INDEPENDENT<br> <br> <b>'I have never left a new play more convinced that I'd</b> <b>witnessed a masterpiece.'</b> DAILY TELEGRAPH<br> <br> <b>'A brilliant, brilliant play. A play of ideas, of consummate</b> theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartache <b>for time never to be regained.'</b> SUNDAY TIMES</p>