Theatre review: Arcadia

Scheduled at the Old Vic before his death but ending up serving as a tribute, Arcadia is probably Tom Stoppard's best-loved play - for me it's certainly the one that's most effective in its use of esoteric knowledge, as the way it muses on science and poetry makes the audience feel clever, as opposed to some of his works that make us feel sneered at. In a country house in 1809, precocious 13-year-old Thomasina (Isis Hainsworth) is being taught maths and classics by her tutor. Septimus (Seamus Dillane) is flirtatious with her mother Lady Croom (Fiona Button,) but is even more indiscreet elsewhere, getting caught in various locations and positions with the wife of Ezra Chater (Matthew Steer.) The house guest and notoriously bad poet issues various challenges to duels, but Septimus always seems able to convince Ezra he was doing him a favour by cuckolding him.

Meanwhile Lady Croom's garden is being remodelled by Richard Noakes (Gabriel Akuwudike) to a romantic ideal that includes a hermitage on the grounds. Almost 200 years later a specialist on the Romantic poets, Hannah (Leila Farzad) is drawn to the estate by a story about an actual hermit having occupied the shack for a couple of decades, eventually dying and leaving behind a pile of unintelligible writings.

Hannah believes unmasking the identity of the mysterious mad hermit could be an explosive subject for an academic paper, but her overbearing rival Bernard (Prasanna Puwanarajah) is convinced he's got an even bigger story: He believes - correctly - that Septimus' old schoolmate Lord Byron was staying at the house during the events of 1809. But Byron is never connected enough to this story for us to actually ever see him on stage, and the great discovery Bernard thinks he's made relies on him wildly misinterpreting clues left behind by the 19th Century characters.

If Arcadia opens with Thomasina throwing together maths and poetry in her lessons, it continues with a theme of finding the beauty in both art and science, and in those like Bernard who dismiss one or the other coming a cropper as a result. In 1993 the descendant of the original family, Valentine (Angus Cooper) is a mathematician whose use of the house's detailed grouse-shooting records for statistical purposes provides the poetry experts with vital evidence for their theories, but which could also overshadow both of them with the possibility that the teenage Thomasina was a forgotten maths genius, making calculations and connections a century ahead of her time.

Although Carrie Cracknell's production does start to feel a bit overlong in the second act it's for the most part successful, with a very strong cast providing the kind of emotion and enthusiasm that brings the philosophising to life. I think there's a couple of secrets to why the play manages to make the audience feel so invested in something that muses so much on maths, poetry, life, death, fate, chaos and the universe among other things, one of which is the sometimes earthy sense of humour that makes the characters human. Another, though, and the pleasure that's quite particular to this play, is the puzzle that he allows us to piece together, while watching the characters, Bernard in particular, build an entirely wrong picture from the same pieces.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is booking until the 21st of March at the Old Vic.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.