Past Event – Faber Members Script Club: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

It’ll be just like other book clubs: you read the script in advance; you discuss it with your fellow readers; you sip a complimentary drink. Together we’ll explore Arcadia’s many, many ideas about time and history, art and science, love and loss; consider the adjective ‘Stoppardian’; and look at the play’s own thirty-three-year history. There’s no need to perform or read aloud unless you want to – just bring your thoughts and curiosity. All are welcome, whether or not you have seen the Old Vic production.

The session will be hosted by Lily Levinson, Editor, Drama, and will last around an hour and a half.

Lily Levinson works on new plays – particularly by emerging and early-career playwrights – and books about theatre on Faber’s Drama list. In the past year, she has worked with playwrights including Kendall Feaver, Sam Grabiner, Tife Kusoro, Matthew López, LUNG Theatre and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson.

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.

In a large English country house in the early nineteenth century, a young genius discovers the mathematics of the universe. In the same house in the present day, two historians attempt to decipher the truth of the past. Poetry, chaos, sex and death dance across both time periods in Stoppard’s wickedly funny and profoundly moving play.

‘I have never left a new play more convinced that I’d witnessed a masterpiece.’ Daily Telegraph

‘A brilliant, brilliant play. A play of ideas, of consummate theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartarche for time never to be regained.’ Sunday Times

‘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 human can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain – not just of ourselves, but of our species?’ Independent