Arcadia is a play written by Tom Stoppard in 1993. We saw the production in The Actor's Theatre in the Luther Burbank Centre.
As the director notes, Arcadia is a "tour-de-force of theatrical scholarship"; she goes on to relate that understanding the play required researching "Byron, chaos theory, thermodynamics, historical landscape gardening, Caroline Lamb, Fermat, Shakespeare and tortoises". She forgot to mention fractals, theories of population dynamics, lesser-known, nineteenth-century poets, plus a good many other things that elude me for the moment. The play posesses the usual Stoppardesque word parlays, too of course.
The plot is comprised of two sequences of events, one set in 1809, in a country house that is having its gardens remodelled, and the other in the 1990s where the same house's gardens are being researched and occasionally archaeologically excavated. In the 1809 scenes, the house and its guests (who include Lord Byron) are up to a predictable amount of adultery, while the tutor, a classmate of Byron, teaches his mathematically-gifted, sixteen-year-old charge. They discuss Newton and determinism and free will, the young genius discovers fractals, though the discovery remains hidden in time because of the intractability of the problem in the absence of computers (and various circumstances that you will have to wait for as knowing them might compromise your enjoyment of the play). In the present-day scenes, an author is writing about the house and its gardens, while an over-zealous academic is attempting to prove that Lord Byron fought and killed a certain poet while staying at the house in 1809. The present-day characters wrestle with the same philosophies, and piece together 1809 happenings from documents they find, with the same level of double-meaning and misguided logic present in a typical Stoppard conversation where the speakers are at cross purposes.
The theme of the play is the discovery of knowledge. It reflects on how things may be discovered, lost, rediscovered, and on links between recursion and history repeating itself. The beating of butterfly wings in Brazil is replaced by the unpredictable vagueries of falling in love, but the idea is the same. It also---inescapable for a Stoppard work---reflects on how information may be misinterpreted, and upon the uncertainty of conclusions drawn from little information, a criticism common in archaeological circles.
You have to have your brain in top gear all the way to follow this one. The references come thick and fast. I got a feeling of stumbling and dropping the ball when I ceased to recognise the sequence of poet's names being dropped; Kay probably had the same feeling when the reversibility of Newtonian mechanics was contrasted to Carnot's principle. Oddly, this did not lessen my enjoyment or my understanding. I think Stoppard aimed to run everyone out somewhere, but made sure it was not critical to following the theme, indeed it may be central to it.
In the last scene, characters from both times hold conversations amongst themselves, oblivious of the characters from the other era, but with their comments intertwining. There is fabulous wordplay and great erudition in this play, every moment has significance. It will take more than one run-through to touch its depths.
Full marks. We are going to buy a copy and read slowly.