Tom Stoppard is most famous for his screenplay to ‘Shakespeare in Love’ for which he won the Oscar Award (the best original screenplay written together with John Madden). His earlier great theatre success was Rosencrantz and Guildstern are no longer alive, which was performed at the renowned theatres in London and New York for four seasons, winning numerous awards and finally filmed.
Arcadia is not only considered Stoppard’s best play, but also the most outstanding British drama of the last years. It is a brilliant show of his erudition and a refined theatre masterpiece escaping simple classification. It can be called a fascinating crime story, a philosophical treaty, a melodrama or a comedy. It can be considered an ingenious literary and philosophical game which seems to be characteristic for Stoppard. This game is happening in two parallel spaces of time, in the early nineteenth century and now, but in the same place – in a room of the Sidley Park estate in Derbyshire. The scandalous Romantic poet Lord George Byron is a hidden protagonist of the plot.