This Week in Literary History: Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia Premieres in London

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On April 13, 1993, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia—a play now considered to be his masterpiece—opened at the Royal National Theatre in London, in a production directed by Trevor Nunn and starring, among others, Rufus Sewell as Septimus Hodge and Bill Nighy as Bernard Nightingale. It won the Olivier Award for Best Play (for the record, that year’s Tony for Best Play went to Love! Valour! Compassion!) and ran for over a year in London’s West End. The text also sold unusually well as a book, and was “reprinted almost 30 times over the next 15 years,” according to The Telegraph.

“Begun in 1991, worked on through 1992 and staged in 1993, Arcadia ​is a mid-life play,” writes Hermione Lee. “It is written at a time of looking back and looking forward, just as the play looks back and forward. … [I]n Arcadia, time is the subject: what is happening to it; how we live in it, not knowing our fates; whether those things which have become ‘lost to view will have their time again.’ Though we must inevitably be lost in time, perhaps time can be conquered, and the past conjured up.”

Arcadia was famously inspired by James Gleick’s 1987 book on chaos theory, Chaos: Making a New Science, and its ideas about “order and randomness,” which Stoppard unpicks in two parallel timelines, each populated by seekers of truth in different forms. “Arcadia is about knowledge, sex and love, death and pastoral, Englishness and poetry, biography and history,” Lee writes. “Not to mention chaos mathematics, iterated algorithms, Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a play with one set, set in two time zones. It is a comedy with a tragedy inside it. And it is a quest story.”

Stoppard died in 2025, his legacy cemented (he might not have taken one home for Arcadia, but he did manage to become the only playwright to have won five Tony Awards for Best Play in his career). “You might say that Shakespeare has his points, or that Samuel Beckett had his day,” writes Helen Shaw in The New Yorker. But it is Stoppard, she asserts, who “left behind a theatre changed by his blistering intellect and blazing success,” and who reigns as the most important influence on contemporary theatre today.