The cast members of the Hampstead Players are hard at work preparing and rehearsing for their production of the play Arcadia later this month.
Arcadia is by Tom Stoppard, generally regarded this country’s most outstanding modern playwright. The play is a scintillating comedy, spanning the centuries between the early 1800’s and the present day
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The setting is a Regency room in Sidley Park, a large country house in Derbyshire. In this room in 1809 sit Lady Thomasina Croom, aged 13, and her tutor having a mathematics lesson. Through the window can be seen some of the “500 acres inclusive of lake” where Capability Brown’s idealised landscape is about to give way to the “picturesque” Gothic style: “everything but vampires” as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in this same room nearly 200 years later. Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which he believes took place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park. The play chronicles the events of 1809 and their spectacularly wrong and hilarious interpretation two centuries later.
When the play was first performed at the Royal National Theatre in 1993 the Sunday Times wrote that it was “a brilliant, brilliant play of ideas, of consummate theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartache for time never to be regained”. This statement sums up exactly what the directors and all those involved in this production, feel about this superb play
Directed by John Hester and John Willmer, Arcadia will be performed in the church on November 24th and 25th at 7.30 p.m. and on November 26th at 2.30 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. Tickets are on sale now at £8 (£6 concessions).
Arcadia