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.

Theatre review: The Invention of Love

Crazy to think Tom Stoppard has spent an entire career writing plays about human beings, despite all the evidence suggesting he's never met one. In fact despite having enjoyed some of his work it may be time to add him to my very short list of creatives I've given enough chances to for one lifetime, as The Invention of Love is based around a premise that should be effortlessly moving, but ends up far too interested in deconstructing Catullus to get round to deconstructing emotions: Simon Russell Beale plays A E Housman, the Victorian poet and classicist who, by the time of his death, seems to have decided that the two pursuits don't really go together, as one requires rules, facts and logic to be set aside in favour of emotional truth, while the other involves picking apart every comma in the name of strict accuracy.

Theatre review: Rock'n'Roll

Tom Stoppard time, so lots of people overheard in the interval carefully avoiding giving an opinion in case they're exposed as not understanding it. Rock'n'Roll pits Communist idealism against Cold War reality via two Cambridge academics, whose lives it follows from 1968 to 1989. Max (Nathaniel Parker) is a lecturer and vocal Communist who thinks he's found an enthusiastic protégé in Czech graduate student Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd.) When Russia invades Czechoslovakia to curb its apparent intentions for reform, Jan returns to Prague in the vague impression that he can do something to help, but the authorities - who sent him to England to spy on Max in the first place, and see if he can be turned to an asset - are unimpressed. But Czechoslovakia is still seen as a comparatively open, accessible part of the Eastern Bloc, and the fact that it allows foreign bands to play is a plus to the music-obsessed Jan.

Theatre review: Leopoldstadt

Widely regarded as England's greatest living male playwright, Tom Stoppard has suggested that Leopoldstadt will be his final play*, which has inevitably meant a lot of attention on Patrick Marber’s premiere production – the Wyndham’s had the “House Full” sign out tonight. It’s a broadly epic sweep over the life of an extended Jewish family in Vienna during the first half of the 20th century, opening and closing with scenes between men with contrasting views of their place in the world and the significance of their heritage. In 1899 Hermann (Adrian Scarborough) is the head of the wealthy Merz family, owner of a textile factory that’s benefited from the trade routes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, compared to the treatment of Jews in the century just ending, he sees the Vienna of his time as a progressive city where he can integrate. In fact there’s a Christmas tree in the opening scene, because Hermann converted to Christianity to marry Gretl (Faye Castelow.)

Theatre review: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Like so much about Hamlet, the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are open to endless interpretation. Two old friends of Hamlet's, they're brought in by King Claudius to spy on his nephew's erratic behaviour, get to the bottom of it if they can, and report back. Later they're used by him again as messengers in an attempt to have Hamlet killed, a plot that ends up backfiring on them. But their appearances are sporadic and brief, leaving each production to fill in the gaps, particularly with regard to how guilty they are of collaboration: Are they happily betraying their friend in return for promised reward? Unhappy with their actions but aware they'll be in danger if they don't comply, like Rosencrantz in the current Robert Icke production, or honestly believing they're helping, like Guildenstern in the same production? Or are their onstage scenes the only idea they have of the main plot, meaning they're barely aware of the story or their part in it?

Theatre review: Travesties

Taking a few moments out from writing and directing everything at the National, Patrick Marber pops a bit further down the South Bank to the Menier to direct a revival of one of Tom Stoppard's better-known plays. Travesties is a treatise on the meaning and relevance of art, for its own sake or as a commentary on the state of the world, through the medium of a sometimes silly comedy seen through the muddled memory of a retired civil servant. Henry Carr (Tom Hollander) is a doddering figure reminiscing about his days working at the British Consulate in Zurich during the First World War, neutral Switzerland a strange kind of calm in the middle of Europe's chaos. As a result it's a focal point for artists and political thinkers, and Carr has dealings with James Joyce, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and the exiled Lenin.

Theatre review: Hapgood

Howard Davies looks around the Tom Stoppard back catalogue and finds something of an oddity in Hapgood, a Cold War spy drama that opens with a dead letter drop in a swimming pool's changing rooms, with multiple briefcases and identically-dressed men making it look less like an exchange of secrets, more like a game of Find the Lady. Hapgood, codenamed Mother (Lisa Dillon,) is the British spymaster in charge of this operation, and when it goes Hapwrong it becomes obvious that someone on the team is betraying them. Suspicion seems to rest firmly on Ridley (Gerald Kyd,) but Hapgood's boss Blair (Tim McMullan) seems to think he can only have done it if she was in on it too. Or maybe he doesn't suspect her at all - the characters are all constantly trying to trip each other up in a series of traps and bluffs.

Theatre review: The Hard Problem

For Nicholas Hytner's final directing job as Artistic Director of the National, he gets one of the biggest-name writers alive to return to the stage after nine years' absence: Tom Stoppard returns to the ways academic theory interacts with people's real emotional landscapes, this time investigating the difference between the brain and the mind. We follow psychologist Hilary (Olivia Vinall) over a few years during which she keeps being troubled by the question of, if the brain is simply a collection of matter, what is consciousness, and how do we determine what has it? We first meet her as a student, and her tutor and on-off lover Spike (Big Favourite Round These Parts Damien Molony) has no doubt that the sense of self is one of many quirks of evolution, and is impatient at Hilary's more spiritual angle, that even takes in prayer. But when she gets a job with Leo (Jonathan Coy,) he encourages her interest in what is termed The Hard Problem.

Theatre review: Shakespeare in Love

Déjà vu at the Noël Coward Theatre, where six months after The Full Monty another screen-to-stage adaptation opens. Whether it'll fare any better is yet to be seen, but for now crowds seem keen to get in to Shakespeare in Love. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's film script has been adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, but the story is still one that places the world's best-loved playwright in a plot straight out of his own comedies: Will Shakespeare (Tom Bateman) is having writer's block after a few early successes, until he meets a new muse in noblewoman Viola De Lesseps (Lucy Briggs-Owen,) who's already madly in love with his poetry before she's even met him. But he's married, and she's about to be married off too, so it seems unlikely they'll be able to find a happy ending together.