I suspect there is much in Stoppard's play that you need a degree in mathematics or a mathematical scientist to get. There's lots of good stuff in there about entropy and its relationship to iterated function systems. It's a favourite of mine though a while since I've read it.
Yes, I'll happily admit that all the mathematics made a faint beep as it shot past me at satellite level.
Ardunno. I quite enjoyed it, but the period costume ball, at which the past and the present clash and intermingle, just struck me as hopelessly contrived, and even picturing Bill Nighy as the loathesome academic (cast in the first production, and exactly who I'd imagined before I read the cast list) still didn't make him likeable or even especially believable. Stoppard tends to write plays about ideas rather than people, and for me this was one of those plays where the people were not sifficiently filled out for it to be worthwhile if the ideas were too esoteric. IYSWIM.
IIRC the people were doing the same mathematics at different time periods -- it's been a good few years. The whole thing is about chaos, fractals (thomasina's drawings are an attempt to reconstruct a Mandelbrot set without a computer to do the legwork -- actually I have heard of someone doing this before Mandelbrot, he roped in his whole family) and entropy -- the cooling tea, the unstirring rice-pudding and so on.
The rabbits which eat their own progeny are iterated functions (generators of chaotic systems) but also a reference to Fibbonacci series.
I think the reason for the title is that it is a reference to the phrase "et in arcadia ego" with entropy instead of death. I quite like this because it makes the otherwise happy title actually morbid.
I as second sheep in the play of Animal Farm (although listed as Sheep #1 in the programme) and the teacher told us all the Stalin/Trotsky connection. And then had to explain the history of communinist Russia due to the fact that it was being acted by a bunch of 11-13 year olds. There was some trouble due to the detail in which he went into to describe the "ice-picking" in an attempt to motivate the dogs...
It was a short step from there to the takeoff of my acting career the next year, when I was knifed by Injun Joe in scene 3.
I'm reminded of the first Shakespeare play I was in, in which I had fuck-all to do for three hours except walk on and stab Coriolanus in the last scene. I couldn't help wishing the conspirators had got their act [sic] together quicker...
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Ardunno. I quite enjoyed it, but the period costume ball, at which the past and the present clash and intermingle, just struck me as hopelessly contrived, and even picturing Bill Nighy as the loathesome academic (cast in the first production, and exactly who I'd imagined before I read the cast list) still didn't make him likeable or even especially believable. Stoppard tends to write plays about ideas rather than people, and for me this was one of those plays where the people were not sifficiently filled out for it to be worthwhile if the ideas were too esoteric. IYSWIM.
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The rabbits which eat their own progeny are iterated functions (generators of chaotic systems) but also a reference to Fibbonacci series.
I think the reason for the title is that it is a reference to the phrase "et in arcadia ego" with entropy instead of death. I quite like this because it makes the otherwise happy title actually morbid.
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The title is a reference to to that phrase, and it was entirely the point to render doom-laden the seemingly jaunty title.
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It was a short step from there to the takeoff of my acting career the next year, when I was knifed by Injun Joe in scene 3.
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