The Waltz of Time 
 Reading Iain Pears' brilliant novel 
 Arcadia 
 just now, I wondered how it might have been influenced by Tom Stoppard's 1993 play of the same title, which has been described [in the article I shall cite below] as "maybe the greatest play of our age." Answer: very much, and yet hardly at all. Stoppard casts his play of ideas as a drawing-room comedy--or rather two comedies alternating in the same room, the one beginning in 1809, the other in 1990. Pears infuses his ideas into a melange of fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopian fiction, with a few other genres thrown in. But many of them are the same ideas: principally, the notion that the past and future are inextricably connected, and that science may be simultaneously our prison and our key to escape. 
 Among the many ideas and images in this play, two in particular stand out. One is symbolized by the changes wrought in the gardens of Sidley Park between 1809 and 1812. What had been a carefully constructed Arcadian landscape of classical balance is turned into a romantic fantasy. "Where there [was] the pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was never spring nor a stone." Order versus passion, facts versus feeling, the aesthetic dilemma of the late 18th century, and I suppose our own. 
 Stoppard's parallel image is mathematical. Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of the earlier period, a teenage genius, is being taught scientific principles by her young tutor, Septimus Hodge, along classical Newtonian lines. But she has two insights. One is to recognize that where most equations are reversible, those of thermodynamics are not: heat will always give way to cold. In other words, math as the calculus of our inevitable demise. The other is the realization that mathematics need not deal only with the perfection of man-made objects, but can describe the random properties of nature as well. She does not not have the computing power to develop her instinctive algorithm, but another Coverly descendant 180 years later, using a laptop computer, can do so easily: it is called chaos theory. 
 In preparing for this review, I read an article by Johann Hari from the Independent of Thursday 21 May 2009. It is a brilliant and comprehensive piece that I recommend to everyone, but which has left me with little to say of my own. Except to quote Hari's last paragraph, describing the ending of the play, when characters from the two centuries stumble onstage together. "It's a moment that shows the power of the play of ideas to fuse together concepts and characters into a theatrical grenade. This final scene is the waltz that takes place inside all of us -- of our ancestors dancing with our present, of reason dancing with irrationality, and of hope dancing with despair, as the roaring, crackling sound of the heat-death draws ever closer." The rest of the article is that good; the play is even better. 
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 Plays are meant to be seen on the stage, so why read them on paper? It's easier for me, I suppose, because I am a director by profession, and scripts are our raw material, like reading the score rather than attending the concert. You can play it out in your own time. You can pause to savor witty lines like "As her tutor, you have a duty to keep her in ignorance." You can feel the genuine emotion welling up through all the clever wordplay. And, an unexpected bonus, you can revel in Stoppard's delightfully off-hand stage directions: "He takes a chair. She remains standing. Possibly she smokes; if so, perhaps now. A short cigarette-holder sounds right, too. Or brown-paper cigarillos." Tom Stoppard in friendly conversation with his director, Trevor Nunn, quite willing to leave such details to him. But where it matters, in his control of characters and ideas, his touch is masterly. A great, great play.