Who We Are. We are a small group of students aspiring to enter the UK theatre scene professionally. The St Andrews Art Theatre (STAAT) is a brand new performing arts company which intends to stage and study contemporary plays that mix traditional and modern styles, invite experimentation, and blend art forms by involving live music, dance, photography, and other visual arts in performance.
What’s The Project? Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is our second project to date, having produced Patrick Marber’s Closer last autumn. We have secured two performances in late March 2025 at the historic Byre Theatre in St Andrews, for which we’re looking to raise additional funds to secure purchases of prop, set, and costume items which will improve the quality of our production. Unlike most student theatre, we aim to elevate our productions to a professional standard in every way we can.
Arcadia is a play in two parts, half set in 1993, the other between 1809-1812. The story is bold, multifaceted, and nonlinear as two 1990s scholars compete to discover the ‘truth’ of what occurred at a stately home in the early 19th century, and those events unfold for audiences too, often underscoring the elusive and inevitable concept of time. The only things they are certain of: it involved a hermit, a duel, and the poet Lord Byron. The unifying factor: all events depicted, in both timelines, occur (sometimes at once!) in the drawing room of the mansion. Our production costs are exclusively related to bringing this physical space to life.
What’s The Money For? We pride ourselves on the research we do towards our plays, and Arcadia offers plenty of opportunities for world building and historical accuracy. The furniture we are hoping to purchase for the set include an architect’s stand, a narrow bookshelf, and Regency period furnishings like a mantel clock, a Sphinx sculpture and Chinese dragon bookends (because Egyptian and Chinese styles were fashionable at the time); we also hope to buy time-specific and thematic props such as a theodolite, ink pots and quills, and 19th literary magazines. Again, we want to be as accurate and detail -oriented as we can, so we are raising funds towards this aim.
Thank You! Any donation, no matter the sum, is greatly appreciated and will benefit our company and our work immeasurably. So, on behalf of all the students involved in STAAT, I’d like to extend a huge thanks to anyone/everyone who takes the time to donate to our budget for Arcadia!