It’s with grimly perfect timing that Tom Stoppard’s undoubted masterpiece – the jewel in the crown of one of the most remarkable bodies of work by any playwright ever – gets its first major London revival in ages less than two months after his death. Not only that, but it’s at the Old Vic: hardly a stranger to Stoppard recently (it ran an excellent production of The Real Thing in 2024), but it is of course where his career began in a mainstream sense with the first major production of his breaththrough Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Arcadia is a tremendously witty meditation on the nature of history, truth, sex, mathmatics and more that is set in two timelines: in 1809, teenage prodigy Thomasina Coverley makes astonishing scientific breakthroughs while under the tutelage of the brilliant but conflicted Septimus Hodge; in the present, a group including the descendents of the original characters try to determine the truth about the events that unfolded two centuries ago.
Carries Cracknell directs the final cast of a Stoppard play to be signed off by Stoppard himself. Rising star Isis Hainsworth plays Thomasina, with Seamus Dillane as Septimus Hodge.
