Arcadia
Why do some moments stick in our minds? Often, they are memorable because they are both exceptional and unanticipated. For me, one was in early March 1995 when the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Arcadia was on at the Playhouse Theatre in Melbourne. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was written in 1993 and premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London on 13 April 1993. It employs what is known as a diachronic narrative method: it is an exploration of two stories set in the same country house, one charting the interaction between two modern academics, and the other concerned with the residents back in the early 19th century, including aristocrats, tutors and even the fleeting presence, unseen on stage, of Lord Byron. In shifting back and forth between 1809 and the 1990s it touches on subjects from landscape gardening to thermodynamics to chaos theory.
The 1809 story focuses on an extraordinarily gifted 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly and her handsome tutor Septimus Hodge. Stoppard imagines this precocious girl, Thomasina, was beginning to toy around with ideas of the laws of thermodynamics and mathematical theory. This topic is balanced by the 20th century story, in which a university professor, Bernard Nightingale and author Hannah Jarvis are visiting the elegant estate where Nightingale plans to conduct research on a literary scandal involving the poet Lord Byron, while Jarvis hopes to find out more about the so-called ‘Sidley Hermit’, a figure found in drawings of the house’s gardens. The themes of the play include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature and the English ‘picturesque’ style of garden design.
Kate Herbert’s review in The Melbourne Times, in late Feb 1995 offers a wonderful introduction to what I saw. “We make of history what suits our politics and philosophy, even an earthly paradise – Arcady. Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, is impeccably crafted, perfectly structured, intelligent, witty and challenging. I cannot fault script, Simon Phillips production nor any individual performance. In inimitable Stoppard fashion, Arcadia unravels a superb biographical-historical plot … [which] interweaves an aristocratic family of the late 18th century Romantic period of literature, painting, gardens and classical mathematics with the 20th century’s literary criticism, computer technology and chaos theory. The result is a mind-bending intersection of worlds charged with sex and conflict.”
Kate Herbert suggests “History always eludes us. It is unscientific, as are natural phenomena and human nature. We cannot quantify it. The unpredictability is the rule, unlike quantum physics and relativity.” She adds “The play captures the “decline from thinking to feeling” which was the social norm after the Age of Reason. The Romantics created their own chaos as have the Chaos Theorists today. We discover that ‘everything you thought you knew, was wrong’ both in life and in the drama. The play is moving, passionate, analytical and inspired.” She was right, a view further enhanced when four years later, during a visit to Winston Salem, North Carolina, I went to another production at Wake Forest University.
So much for when I saw it – but what as it that made this such an unforgettable experience? Set in Sidley Park, an English country house in Derbyshire, the action takes place in both 1809/1812 and the present day (1993 in the original production). The activities of two modern scholars and the house’s current residents are juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period. The play’s set features a large table, used by the characters in both past and present. Props are not removed when the play switches time period; books, coffee mugs, quill pens, portfolios, and laptop computers appear together, blurring past and present. An ancient but still living tortoise also appears in every scene, perhaps as a symbol of long-suffering endurance and of the continuity of existence.
Arcadia explores the nature of evidence and truth in the context of modern ideas about history, mathematics, and physics. It shows how clues left by the past are interpreted in the present, by both laypeople and scholars. Stoppard has said that his initial inspiration came from reading James Gleick’s 1987 bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, “which is about this new kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one’s talking about a play. I thought, here is a marvellous metaphor,” (quoted by Paul Delaney in Tom Stoppard in Conversation. UMP 1994. p. 224).
As the Wikipedia entry on the play explains “Besides chaos, the play attends to a wide array of subjects, including thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics, landscape design, Romanticism vs Classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18th Century Periodicals, modern academia and even South Pacific Botany. These are all concrete topics of conversation; their more abstract resonances rise into epistemology, nihilism, and the origins of lust and madness”. Stoppard was writing for an intellectual audience!
In Arcadia, Stoppard presents his audience with several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts. He also uses these theories and ideas to illuminate relationships among his characters, adding to their poignancy. Arcadia’s complex themes are presented through a series of dichotomies. Most prominent is chaos versus order. The play’s characters and action embody this, moving from a settled social order, in which relationships arise, toward the final scene, where the social order – and even the separation of the two eras – dissolve in the party’s chaos, relationships collapse, and the characters die or disperse. Yet within that chaos, order can still be found. As Valentine declares: “In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.” Although the play’s world grows increasingly chaotic – with overlapping time periods, increasingly complex ideas, and ever greater variations in social norms and assumptions – connections and order can still be discerned. The characters attempt to find and articulate the order they perceive in their world, even as it is continually overturned.
One of the play’s main thematic concepts is chaos theory. Paul Edwards, in his essay “Science in Hapgood and Arcadia“, notes that “chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. […] It is ‘asymmetric’ (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy”. John Fleming, in his book Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos, makes a similar observation. “Deterministic chaos”, he writes, “deals with systems of unpredictable determinism. … [T]he uncertainty does not result in pure randomness, but rather in complex patterns. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour.” But as systems respond to variations in input, they become more random or chaotic. “Surprisingly, within these random states, windows of order reappear. […] There is order in chaos – an unpredictable order, but a determined order nonetheless, and not merely random behaviour.”
That centre-stage table with props from both time periods in place throughout the play is a vivid metaphor of the chaos/order dichotomy. As Paul Edwards, professor of English and History of Art at Bath Spa University, suggests:
At the end of the play, the table has accumulated a variety of objects that, if one saw them without having seen the play, would seem completely random and disordered. Entropy is high. But if one has seen the play, one has full information about the objects and the hidden ‘order’ of their arrangement, brought about by the performance itself. Entropy is low; this can be proved by reflecting that tomorrow night’s performance of the play will finish with the table in a virtually identical ‘disorder’ – which therefore cannot really be disorder at all.
Paul Edwards, The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, CUP, 178–183
A closely related theme in Arcadia is the opposition of Classicism and Romanticism. This appears most clearly in the running arguments between Noakes and Lady Croom about proposed changes to the garden. Their disagreements are about changing from the tidy order of Classic style to the rugged naturalism and Gothic mystery of the Romantic. A parallel dichotomy is expressed by Septimus and Thomasina: He instructs her in the Newtonian vision of the universe, while she keeps posing questions and proposing theories that undercut it. Hannah’s search for the hermit of Sidley Park also comments on this theme. “The whole Romantic sham!” she passionately exclaims to Bernard. “It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius … The decline from thinking to feeling.”
Another major theme is entropy and the irreversibility of time. Thomasina examines this scientifically, remarking that while Newtonian equations work both backwards and forwards, things in reality – like her rice pudding – cannot be “unstirred.” Heat, too, she notes, flows in only one direction (the second law of thermodynamics). This is embodied by the characters, who burn bridges in relationships, burn candles, and burn letters – and in the end, Thomasina herself (like a short-lived candle) burns to death. Thomasina’s insights are an echo of the poem Darkness by her ‘real life’ contemporary, Lord Byron. Written in 1816 , which was described as the ‘The Year Without A Summer’ when atmospheric ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies fell. Darkness depicts a world grown dark and cold because the sun has been extinguished.
The play’s end brings all these dichotomous themes together, showing that while things may appear to contradict – Romanticism and Classicism, intuition and logic, thought and feeling – they can exist, paradoxically, in the same time and space. Order is found amid the chaos. At the same time, scientific and mathematical concepts in Arcadia include the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. Entropy is the measure of the randomness or disorder of a system which states that overall, the universe is evolving from order to disorder. At the same time, the second law of thermodynamics states that heat spontaneously flows in only one direction, from hotter to colder. These equations embody the ‘arrow of time’ and the eventual ‘heat death’ of the universe. Thomasina captures the dark side of science.
In Arcadia, Stoppard uses all these concepts to reveal that “there is an underlying order to seemingly random events.” The characters discuss these topics, while their interactions reflect them. Often these discussions themselves create order and connections beneath the appearance of disunity. For example, both Thomasina’s theories on heat and Valentine’s search for a “signal” in the “noise” of the local grouse population refer to the physicist Joseph Fourier and his development of the Fourier transform, which he first used to analyse the physics of heat transfer but has since found wide application. Though the characters would seem to have little in common, their work relates to the same topic.
There is even more to this intellectual tour de force. The play’s title was abbreviated from its initial version: Et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia refers to the pastoral ideal, and the phrase literally translates, “and in Arcadia I am”. The tradition of placing a tomb in a pastoral idyll has a long history, and the phrase appears in Guercino’s painting dated in 1618-1622. Both the image and the motto are commonly linked with the phrase being spoken by Death: “I, too, am in Arcadia”. In the play, Lady Croom, translates the phrase as “Here I am in Arcadia!” Thomasina drily comments, “Yes Mama, if you would have it so”. Septimus notices this and later, suspecting his pupil will appreciate the motto’s true meaning, offers the translation “Even in Arcadia, there am I”. He is right – “Oh, phooey to Death!” she exclaims. Although these brief exchanges are the only direct references in the play to its title, they anticipate two main characters’ fates: Thomasina’s early death, and Septimus’s voluntary exile from life.
In a more obvious sense, the title also invokes the ideal of nature as an ordered paradise, while the estate’s landscape steadily evolves into a more irregular form. This provides a recurring image of the different ways in which “true nature” can be understood, and a homely parallel to Thomasina’s theoretical description of the natural world’s structure and entropic decline using mathematics.
Overall, Arcadia draws on several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts. Having noted that one of the play’s main thematic concepts is chaos theory, Paul Edwards, (in ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’), notes that “chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. […] It is ‘asymmetric’ (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy”. What a compelling perspective for a playwright, that there is order in chaos. If it is an underlying and unpredictable order, there’s order nonetheless, and far from random.
In Arcadia, Stoppard draws on all these ideas as his characters discuss an almost bewildering variety of topics. He reveals himself as a Levi-Straussian bricoleur. In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought, which draw on a variety of things ‘at hand’, putting objects, ideas and histories together in new ways, using them for purposes that weren’t previously considered. Like Levi-Strauss analysing mythologies, Stoppard is a contemporary bricoleur, taking what we know from 19th Century and contemporary science and technology and rethinking ideas, to explore unanticipated possibilities and interactions just as he uses Thomasina’s theories on heat and Valentine’s search for a ‘signal in the noise’ in that imagined analysis of the local grouse population. Some ideas in the play recall Goethe’s novella Elective Affinities: Thomasina and Septimus have parallels in Goethe’s Ottilie and Eduard and the historical section of Stoppard’s play is set in 1809, the year of Goethe’s novella. There is so much more packed into this play, and if you’d like to dive into its riches, go along to a performance.
What more can I say? Arcadia is a 20th Century intellectual masterpiece and a stunning play. Vale Stoppard, who died 29 November 2025. He will be missed; his plays will live on.
