Arcadia

Tom Stoppard's masterpiece, with a beautiful new cover. <BR><BR>Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in.<BR><BR>Arcadia premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play.<BR><BR>'It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are Romanticism, Classicism, and the meaning of life . . . 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. Yes, the characters bond over ideas - but some of the most interesting people in life do just that. That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece - but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain - not just of ourselves, but of our species?' INDEPENDENT<BR><BR>'I have never left a new play more convinced that I'd witnessed a masterpiece.' DAILY TELEGRAPH<BR><BR>'A brilliant, brilliant play. A play of ideas, of consummate theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartache for time never to be regained.' SUNDAY TIMES