If you want to stump your teacher, ask her to sum up
Arcadia in ten words or less. (Or if you want to impress her, figure out a clever way to do it yourself.) The wide range of topics in
Tom Stoppard 's
Arcadia has made it a favorite for college freshman-year read-alongs, as a book that, ideally, can appeal to anyone from emo poets to science nerds.
Early reviewers of
Arcadia's initial run remarked that Tom Stoppard, like the
Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz, had at long last found his heart. After almost three decades of plays that some saw more as intellectual exercises than heartfelt drama (Stoppard's first success was with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that retells
Hamlet from the point of view of its two most insignificant characters), lots of commentators felt that Stoppard was finally getting his emotional groove on. While his subsequent plays have been successful both in London and on Broadway,
Arcadia and good old
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain the plays for which Stoppard is best known. (You may have also heard of a few films that he contributed to:
Shakespeare in Love and
Brazil.)
While
Arcadia may seem like a model of English-ness (which can make it a little confusing for an American audience), Tom Stoppard was in fact born in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), under the name Tomas Straussler. He lived in India before moving to England. While England has become his adopted home, Stoppard has also never forgotten his roots: his play
Indian Ink is set, not surprisingly, in India, and his most recent work,
Rock 'n' Roll, moves between Oxford and Prague. And the Czechs haven't forgotten him either: there's a Tom Stoppard Prize, given to writers of Czech origin. Besides his plays, Stoppard has also worked for decades on human rights issues in Eastern Europe and elsewhere...so maybe those critics shouldn't have needed
Arcadia to know he had a heart.