#165 / Arcadia

There are still a couple of days left to see Arcadia at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Arcadia is one of the best plays that Tom Stoppard ever wrote. Stoppard (pictured) has written a lot of great plays, too!

As in all of Stoppard's works, Arcadia contains a lot of word play. And there is a lot of sex (not graphic). And there is, more than anything else, an expression of the ineffable beauty of this human life, this dance through time, till death, and an appreciation of its wonder and its greatness, no matter what we may lose along the way:

Oh, Septimus! - can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! ... How can we sleep for grief?

By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sopocles, nineteen from Euripides ... You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. 

Worth seeing!

Image Credit:
http://tunbridgewells.so/whats-on/arcadia-trinity-oct2012