Reception
The Times, reviewing the first production in 1993, praised the "perfect marriage of ideas and high comedy", but for some the ideas overwhelmed the comedy: "...too clever by about two-and-three-quarters. One comes away instructed with more than one can usefully wish to know..." noted The Daily Mail. The play's West End transfer, after an eight-month run at the National, gave an opportunity for re-appraisal and The Daily Telegraph commented: "I have never left a play more convinced that I had just witnessed a masterpiece".
Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the play as "Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion" but many New York reviews were mixed or unfavourable, citing anachronisms and a lack of realism in Stoppard's conception.
The London revival of 2009 prompted more critics to laud the play as "Stoppard's finest work". Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian that " play gets richer with each viewing ... there is poetry and passion behind the mathematics and metaphysics." Johann Hari of The Independent speculated that the work would come to be recognised "as the greatest play of its time".
The 2011 Broadway production, directed by David Leveaux, met with a mixed reception. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called it "a half-terrific revival of Mr. Stoppard's entirely terrific Arcadia", noting that "several central roles are slightly miscast", and "some of the performances from the Anglo-American cast are pitched to the point of incoherence." Similar concerns over the production's casting and performances were also raised by critics from the New York magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Time Out New York and Bloomberg News.
Read more about this topic: Arcadia (play)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)