Arcadia (Faber Drama)

by Tom Stoppard

I think you have not been candid with me, Septimus. A gazebo is not, after all, a meat larder.

Hannah Well! This is a new experience for me. A grovelling academic. Bernard Oh, I say. Hannah Oh, but it is. All the academics who reviewed my book patronized it. Bernard Surely not. Hannah Surely yes. The Byron gang unzipped their flies and patronized all over it. Where is it you don’t bother to teach, by the way? Bernard Oh, well, Sussex, actually.

I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation. You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten.

Sir – I repent your injury. You are an honest fellow with no more malice in you than poetry.

We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.

We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way,

The light changes to early morning. From a long way off, there is a pistol shot. A moment later there is the cry of dozens of crows disturbed from the unseen trees.

Only one? So Chater, dead; Sebastian... fled? In exchange for the hand of Charity?

a minor poet like Ezra Chater could go to his death in a Derbyshire glade as unmissed and unremembered as his contemporary and namesake, the minor botanist who died in the forests of the West Indies, lost to history like the monkey that bit him.

Bernard Darling – Hannah Don’t call me darling. Bernard Dickhead, then, is it likely that the man Chater calls his friend Septimus Hodge is the same man who screwed his wife and kicked the shit out of his last book? Hannah Put it like that, almost certain. Chloë (earnestly) You’ve been deeply wounded in the past, haven’t you, Hannah?

If everybody had his own I would bear my portion of the agony without complaint. But to have been singled out by the only Improved Newcomen steam pump in England, this is hard, sir, this is not to be borne.

Is there room for a piano?

I adore Septimus