Stoppard's 1993 play moves between 1809 and the present in a single English country house, interweaving a nineteenth-century romantic triangle with a modern academic mystery. The play is about entropy, about landscape gardening, about the second law of thermodynamics, about love, about what we can know of the past and what is lost forever. The final scene, in which both centuries share the stage, is one of the most beautiful moments in modern theatre. Stoppard's wit is at its peak. The play succeeds as comedy, as elegy, and as philosophical meditation simultaneously.