Stoppard s Arcadia Comes Home to Stowe

Tom Stoppard s Arcadia is coming home to Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, the place which inspired the playwright's country house location for the play. The new production will run for one week only from 11 July 1998.

In Arcadia, Stoppard's complex tragi-comedy about the quest for knowledge and the need for beauty, the action shifts between an English stately home in 1809 and the same house in the present day. Central to the play is its setting with the idealised Capability Brown landscape and Palladian architecture of the house's grounds.

Stoppard acknowledges the impact Stowe had on the play's creation. “Stowe was naturally much in my mind during the writing of Arcadia as a sublime expression of Englishness which I discovered when I was eight years old and fell in love with at first sight,” he writes on the Stowe website.

The revival at Stowe removes Arcadia from a traditional theatrical space and places it in the 750 acres of Stowe, home of the famous boarding school for the past 75 years. The production forms a part of the Stowe School's Jubilee celebrations. Proceeds will be split between Stowe House Preservation Trust and the charity WarChild, of which Tom Stoppard is a patron.

Arcadia first opened at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton venue in April 1993, starring Felicity Kendal, Rufus Sewell and Emma Fielding and directed by Trevor Nunn.

The Stowe production is co-produced by Simon Channing Williams, Palm D Or winning producer of Mike Leigh s film Secret and Lies.

For further information, contact the Stowe box office on 01280 813650.

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