By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN? Monday 26 January, opens 4 February and runs through 21 March 2026 RUNTIME: 170 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Tom Stoppard died in November and 1993’s Arcadia is considered to be his masterpiece which makes this undercast revival all the more curious.

• Read on for reasons including how it seems a missed opportunity that this 2nd revival of his classic is so understated

The Old Vic was where Stoppard’s 1st hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was staged in 1967 and also hosted a triumphant 50th anniversary revival starring Daniel Radcliffe where we spied Stoppard in its audience almost a decade ago

Arcadia‘s 1st London revival in 2009 starred Dan Stevens and Samantha Bond and yet Old Vic director Carrie Cracknell (The Grapes Of Wrath, National Theatre) has opted for a cast without big names and a minimal set in the round with a double revolve as Stoppard’s order of theory collides with the chaos of sex.

Luckily, Arcadia proves that it has the heft to withstand both undercasting and underplaying and it’s a delight to hear this sold-out audience laughing from the off as brilliant teenage student Thomasina, a precocious Isis Hainsworth (The House Of Bernarda Alba, National Theatre), questions her tutor in 1809 about the meaning of ‘carnal embrace’.

The action jumps to the present day where, like Fiona Bruce in TV’s Fake Or Fortune?, an academic and an author clash and then combine to discover whether Lord Byron was also in Thomasina’s orbit back in 1809.

In a letter to The Times after Stoppard’s death a professor wrote how seeing Arcadia in 1993 made him rethink the behaviour of breast cancer leading to the birth of ‘adjuvant systemic chemotherapy’ concluding ‘Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia‘.

Thomasina asks her tutor: ‘If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for 1 like a bluebell and, if a bluebell, why not a rose?’

Stoppard goes on to illuminate chaos theory which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer.

The butterfly effect is also used to explain how it can be used with 80 per cent certainty to convince someone has penned Brighton’s local paper The Argus.

Arcadia contains a lot of big ideas and their deployment is as dizzying as the sexual tension propelling the plot is intoxicating.

We doubt Stoppard would have much truck with sentimentality after his death but it seems a missed opportunity that this 2nd revival of his classic is so understated although it does reveal quite how strong, if a little overpowering, the source material is.

• Main pictures by Manuel Harlan courtesy Old Vic Tickets
• Have you seen a Tom Stoppard play before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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