“Writing a play,” Tom Stoppard informed an interviewer in 1977“is like smashing that ashtray, filming it in sluggish movement, after which operating the movie in reverse, in order that the fragments of rubble seem to fly collectively. You begin—or at the very least I begin—with the rubble.”
In life, after all, this type of reversal is inconceivable. Because the physicist Valentine Coverley places it in Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia“You possibly can’t run the movie backwards. Warmth was the very first thing which didn’t work that approach. Not like Newton. A movie of a pendulum, or a ball falling by the air—backwards, it appears the identical … However with warmth—friction—a ball breaking a window … It gained’t work backwards … You possibly can put again the bits of glass however you possibly can’t acquire up the warmth of the smash. It’s gone.”
However making the fragments fly collectively was the form of thermodynamic miracle that Stoppard pulled off often. His performs do unusual issues to time. Arcadiaset between 1809 and the Current Day in an ever extra disorderly room in an English manor home, braids collectively the messy strands of two eras in a narrative of affection, math, panorama structure, and the looming shadow of Lord Byron. Stoppard performs are usually about such thrilling lists of seemingly unconnected themes, which, in another person’s arms, could be match for parody. However by the point Stoppard is completed with them, you’ll by no means once more consider students trying to find a hermit in a Nineteenth-century panorama with out additionally pondering of chaos principle.
Since Stoppard’s loss of life, final weekend, I’ve been returning to Arcadia. By no means has a play in regards to the inevitable warmth loss of life of the universe been so hilarious and energetic. (“Septimus,” Thomasina says within the first line, “what’s carnal embrace?” “Carnal embrace is the observe of throwing one’s arms round a aspect of beef,” Septimus replies.) It abounds in puns, in juicy monologues, in stage instructions well worth the value of admission—a tortoise performs two roles and serves as a paperweight throughout time.
My favorites of his performs all burst with this enthusiasm—for all times, for science, for literature, for artwork. Right here’s Stoppard’s model of the poet and classicist A. E. Housman in The Invention of Love: “I’d be part of Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if solely, every time it rolled again down, I got a line of Aeschylus.” Right here’s Valentine once more on physics: “It makes me so glad. To be at first once more, figuring out nearly nothing. Individuals had been speaking in regards to the finish of physics. Relativity and quantum appeared as in the event that they had been going to wash out the entire downside between them. A principle of all the things. However they solely defined the very massive and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The normal-size stuff which is our lives, the issues folks write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what occurs in a cup of espresso when the cream goes in—these items are filled with thriller, as mysterious to us because the heavens had been to the Greeks.”
If all of the world’s a stage, then fairly a couple of of Stoppard’s performs happen within the wings. “I’m lifeless then. Good,” Stoppard’s Housman says in the beginning of The Invention of Love. He involves revise this opinion later, when he realizes that the boatman transporting him throughout the River Styx has solely the fragments of Aeschylus that he himself already is aware of. However Housman isn’t the one Stoppard character to hover within the margins of being; he simply occurs to be in a classical imaginative and prescient of the afterlife reasonably than, say, simply offstage, ready for his cue, the place Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wrangle their very own questions of existence.
Entropy comes for us all—however then the lights go down, the curtain rises, and for a second, the items have all flown collectively and also you get again the warmth of the smash. Resisting that inevitable warmth loss of life, discovering a intelligent loophole, stirring issues collectively so that they’re irreversibly linked—that was the feat Stoppard carried out many times. As his Ada Lovelace–impressed, Byron-adjacent math prodigy Thomasina Coverley places it elsewhere in Arcadia“You can’t stir issues aside.”
Demise hovers past the curtain. We all know what turns into of everybody: of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Thomasina, Housman, Stoppard himself. However his performs maintain us within the second earlier than, outdoors of time, when the inconceivable is at all times occurring.
Earlier than Thomasina goes upstairs with the lit candle that can spell her loss of life, she pauses to bounce along with her tutor, Septimus. When the lights go down, they’re nonetheless dancing.
