Arcadia Begins Performances at A Noise Within

A Noise Within Theatre launches its 25th-anniversary season as Arcadia begins performances tonight.

Tom Stoppard's science-centered Arcadia is set in Sidley Park, an English country house in Derbyshire, and takes place from 1809 to 1812 as well as in the present day. The activities of two modern scholars and the house's current residents are juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period. Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics, nature, and physics. She studies with her tutor Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron (an unseen guest in the house). In the present, writer Hannah Jarvis and literature professor Bernard Nightingale converge on the house: She is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; he is researching a mysterious chapter in the life of Lord Byron. As their studies unfold and eventually overlap, the truth about what happened in Thomasina's time is gradually revealed.

Geoff Elliott directs the company of Erika Soto, Rafael Goldstein, Mitchell Edmonds, Jeremy Rabb, Eric Curtis Johnson, Abby Craden, Stephen Weingartner, Richy Storrs, Susan Angelo, Jill Renner, Freddy Douglas, and Tavis Doucette.

In 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain named Arcadia one of the best science-related works ever written. Remarking on the play's relationship to science, Elliott said, "Arcadia is a carefully constructed and brilliantly crafted play. Every time I read it, just like chaos theory itself, something new occurs for me. In an extraordinary way, Stoppard has seamlessly woven complex scientific ideas into the heart of the play."

Performances continue through November 20.

For more information and tickets, click here.