Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Old Vic – review

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is a truly marvellous play, full of wit, wisdom and a rare warmth. Seeing it revived so soon after his death at the age of 88 in November is a reminder of just what great writing looks and feels like. It has a timeless quality that is entirely appropriate to its many themes.

Perhaps it is the consciousness of posthumous responsibility that makes Carrie Cracknell’s production feel slightly reverential, at least on press night. I suspect, as it runs, it will relax and grow. At the moment, it sings but doesn’t quite soar. Yet it is still utterly irresistible.

First seen in 1993, Arcadia is a play about so many things that it is hard to know where to begin. Set in two time periods – 1809 and the present day – on the same imaginary country estate in Derbyshire, it is essentially about the chaos and order of all existence. In the early 19^th century, the precious 13-year-old Thomasina (a radiant Isis Hainsworth) discovers chaos theory and the way it disrupts the Newtonian view of the universe.

In the present, two academics Hannah, played by Leila Farzad and Prasanna Puwanarajah as Bernard, try to discover what exactly happened to Thomasina, her tutor Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane), Lord Byron (who does not appear) and a minor poet called Chater (who does).

The play unfolds like the fractured, repeated patterns of the universe in Thomasina’s theory, offering a series of delicate, close-up images that, pieced together, make up the full picture. No character is ever in command of the full story; history proves as baffling and incomplete as science. The entire narrative is a vindication of the idea that, as one character puts it, “the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”

Cracknell and her set designer Alex Eales, working in the round, create an elegantly effective revolve, circled by low benches and with two entwined rings of light (by Guy Hoare) and lamps hanging overhead. It opens and closes with Thomasina clambering on a chair to raise a graceful hand heavenwards, searching for a truth that is always elusive but – like the works in the Great Library of Alexandria whose loss makes Thomasina cry – never quite lost.

The play packs in so many ideas, its intellectual tug running back and forth. There’s an entire strand about the creation of Arcadias, and the Romantic notion of a garden as a recreation of an untamed nature. It is also incredibly funny, and its richness lies in the way that its thoughts never compromise its humanity. Instead, they underline them as Stoppard shows chaos and unpredictability at work in human relations too. Sex and people “fancying people they shouldn’t” is another disruptor of the maths of the universe.

This spark, that electricity flying between the characters, powers the play just as much as its ideas. They spark from Fiona Button’s Lady Croom as she argues with her gardener or flirts with Dillane’s Byronic Septimus; they pulse between Thomasina and her tutor as well.

Hainsworth is wonderful in the way she registers all Thomasina’s longing, her mischievous cleverness and innocent love flashing across her face and Angus Cooper makes her latter-day heir, mathematical Valentine, full of awkward affection and anxiety. But the attractions between Puwanarajah’s odiously self-satisfied Bernard and Farzad’s gentler Hannah register less strongly. They seem a little self-consciously smart; the lines between them don’t always flex and fly.

The play continues to shine, though – a multi-faceted gem that glimmers in every light, thought-provoking and profoundly moving. It’s a glory.