Arcadia

Bodies collide, but their heat dissipates. Everybody gets mixed up together, until we all end up at room temperature. Only playwriting's most playful polymath Tom Stoppard could show that post-Newtonian physics' troubling predictions about the end of the universe are also the principles of farce. Stoppard's dizzying 1993 drama is set in a country house in two different eras: 1809-11 and 1989. (Designer Hildegard Bechtler's classically proportioned garden room is the unchanging backdrop for both.) Earnest young Lady Thomasina (Jessie Cave) quibbles over Fermat's last theorem with her rakish tutor Septimus (Dan Stevens). And 200 years later, cocky modern media don Bernard Nightingale (Neil Pearson) shags, bullies and charms his way through the Coverley family. Stop-at-nothing literary rivalry, hilarious bed-hopping, dazzling repartee and a live tortoise paperweight are also perennials in this manmade paradise. And unpredictable death is the worm in its apple - whether that's symbolised by the Apple Mac laptop of Ed Stoppard's geeky modern mathematician, Valentine, or a preposterously rosy fruit from 1809's landscaped Eden.

Stoppard's play is too nimble and wide-ranging to be pinned down in a summary: there's a thesis on the hermit and the decline of the enlightenment in there and a brief history of landscape gardening as well as several Romantic literary controversies and some unforgettably clear scientific metaphors. David Leveaux's elegantly barbed revival is superbly cast. Stevens's Septimus is enjoyably cynical but touchingly tender towards his brilliant young pupil, even as he's trying to manoeuvre her mother (Nancy Carroll's sublimely haughty Lady Croom) into bed. And Pearson combines the sleazy enthusiasm of a car salesman with a redeeming passion for knowledge: movingly, this very human desire is the final straw that every character in the play places against the vast and cooling universe that otherwise dwarfs them and all of us.