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Arcadia Arcadia. By Tom Stoppard. Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont by arrangement with the Royal National Theatre, New York. 23 August 1995.
In Tom Stoppard's Arcadia we are invited, as in the Eliot poem "La Figlia Che Piange," to "lean on a garden urn" and contemplate the nature of memory and the nature of time (in Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 [San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1930; 1980), 20). The woman remembered in Eliot's poem is lost; the one in the play is Thomasina Coverly. She is remembered obliquely: first as the child of Sidley Park, where the poet Lord Byron may have killed a rival; and secondly as a cipher in a mathematical intrigue. By the play's end, Thomasina has involved the audience in her formula, becoming the iterated figure in a remarkable equation.
This equation haunts Arcadia and drives its satisfying structure. Thomasina has an intuition of what is now known as "chaos theory," a formula for the devolution of order and disorder. In Thomasina's conception, the random order of the natural world should be demonstrable in an algebraic equation. The chaos of human relations in Arcadia points to repetitions in observation: Thomasina observing adults; Valentine observing grouse; professors observing poets; Gus, the mute savant, observing the folly of those around him; and finally, the audience observing the...