Time Travelling Stoppard Comedy to Be Staged at the Questors
Arcadia has more than one link with the Ealing area
Shakespeare's comedy to be performed this month
May 18, 2023
Tom Stoppard’s time-jumping play Arcadia will be staged in the Judi Dench Playhouse from 3 June to 10 June.
Two contemporary scholars set about a Derbyshire country estate and uncover mysterious past events. What really happened to Thomasina Coverly, a gifted student, 180 years ago at Sidley Park?
In 1809 at an elegant country estate, Thomasina proposes an extraordinary theory. Around her, the adults, including her tutor Septimus, are preoccupied with forbidden desires, illicit passions and burning rivalries.
Two hundred years later, academic adversaries Hannah and Bernard are piecing together mystifying clues, recalling those events of 1809.
Thomasina Coverly is loosely based on Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Byron, later the Countess of Lovelace. At 17 she had developed a mathematical ability, which led to her work with Charles Babbage on his proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Difference Engine. Ada was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and subsequently published the first algorithm to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. She spent part of her early years living at Fordhook House in Ealing Common, where she married William, Baron King (who later became the Earl of Lovelace) in 1835. A school named after Ada Lovelace opened in Ealing in 2018.
Alex Marker, artistic director at the Questors says there is a connection between Tom Stoppard and the Ealing theatre commenting, “The Questors Theatre has long held a reputation as a theatre which champions new writing, including a young Tom Stoppard at the beginning of his career when we presented an early version of his hit play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It’s a delight to return to his work and stage what has been described by critics as one of his finest plays. Set in two different time periods, this play deftly blends comedy, tragedy, chaos theory and landscape gardening into a beguiling cocktail which investigates how clues left by the past are interpreted by the present…”
Standard tickets are £14 with discounts for members and concessions.
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