'Arcadia' by Tom Stoppard

10 August 2026

I've always enjoyed the plays of Tom Stoppard - from 'The Real Inspector Hound', 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead', 'The Real Thing', 'Travesties' and 'Jumpers' to 'The Hard Problem' (reviewed here in April 2015) and ‘Leopoldstadt’ (reviewed here in February 2022). I was even lucky enough to see Stoppard giving a pre-show talk before a performance of ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ at the National Theatre in 2009 (reviewed here in February 2009). When Tom Stoppard died in November 2025, reading the obituaries and tributes I was reminded that I had never seen the play that has often been described as his best work. I remember reading the reviews of the original production of 'Arcadia' at the National Theatre in 1993 but I didn't manage to get to see it. I did, though, really enjoy the audio recording of the play by that original cast (including Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendal, Bill Nighy and Emma Fielding) which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1993. On Saturday I finally got to see 'Arcadia' on stage, at the Duke of York's Theatre (soon to be renamed the Tom Stoppard Theatre) in London's West End. Carrie Cracknell's production opened at the Old Vic in January this year and transferred to the West End in June. The production is presented in the round and we decided to get seats on the stage, which gave us a wonderful close-up view of the actors: most of the time it felt like we were watching a studio production. 'Arcadia' is a brilliant play. Set in a grand country house in Derbyshire in two different times (1809 and 1993) it shows modern academics researching the early 19th century events at the house, which we also see directly. This is a canvas for Stoppard to explore a range of ideas and themes, including mathematics, iterative algorithms, chaos theory, academic methods, the picturesque and landscape gardening. This preponderance of topics helps to avoid the script becoming too didactic, as the pomposity of certain characters is constantly pricked by interruptions and digressions by their peers. It's also a very funny play, with an extensive cast who are initially confined to the scenes set in their own timeline but then begin to cross over with their counterparts from another age. It's a great cast: Oliver Chris channels Bill Nighy as the Tiggerish academic Bernard Nightingale, for whom Nikki Amuka-Bird's Hannah Jarvis is more than a match, and Angus Cooper's Valentine Coverly is a gentle, sympathetic referee between them. Yolanda Kettle is commanding as Lady Croom and Seamus Dillane as the tutor Septimus Hodge is witty, knowing and charmingly disreputable. But Isis Hainsworth steals the show as the teenage mathematical product Thomasina Coverly - a proto-Ada Lovelace. It was particularly interesting to see 'Arcadia' so soon after reading Ian McEwan's novel 'What We Can Know' (reviewed here in August 2026) which has a very similar structure - with academics trying to unearth the details of the events of a previous century through the discovery of written sources - and slightly misinterpreting them. And both plots revolve around the works of a poet. But Stoppard is much funnier.