Arcadia review, Old Vic – Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece gets a stellar, lust-filled revival

“It’s wanting to know that makes us matter,” says historical author Hannah (Leila Farzad), one of the impossibly eloquent coterie that populates the late Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia. They’re all doggedly hunting for knowledge as if it were rare feathered game hidden in the grounds of an English country manor – while distracted by the hazards of sex and boredom, and the terror of their own irrelevance. Carrie Cracknell’s stellar Old Vic revival ditches the rolling lawns and airy Classical architecture of Stoppard’s setting in favour of a fluid, dimly lit, in-the-round staging that emphasises that these characters are reaching out of the known world and into the stars.

Much like the grand house it revolves around, Arcadia is built on reassuringly sturdy foundations. It’s set across two time periods: the dawn of the 19th century, and the present day (1993, at Stoppard’s time of writing). In the Romantic past, Ada Lovelace-esque teenage maths prodigy Thomasina is attempting to find formulas that do justice to nature’s infinite complexity – Isis Hainsworth beautifully captures the impetuous enthusiasms of a 13-year-old who’s simultaneously smarter than scientists twice her age, and whimsical enough to be convinced she’ll marry Lord Byron some day soon. Her brilliant tutor Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane) spurs her to new intellectual heights with the promise of an extra spoonful of jam on her rice pudding. But he’s somewhat distracted by the prospect of a duel with poet Ezra Chater (Matthew Steer), following some romantic indiscretions in the manor’s gazebo.

Perhaps inevitably, the more modern scenes are less juicy. Historical writer Hannah is attempting to convince the world of her thesis that the Romantic era represents the depressing deterioration of the grandeur of the Enlightenment. And as she plunders this country house’s archives for evidence, she crosses paths with gossip-hungry scholar Bernard, who’s become ill-advisedly convinced that Byron committed a scandalous murder on its grounds. Prasanna Puwanarajah is hilariously unsavoury as this ponytailed pervert, celebrating each fresh “discovery” with an unwelcome kiss on Hannah’s lips. But in Cracknell’s hands, these cynically painted scenes sometimes drag a little; the archetype of a sexually repressed feminist author arguably sits less well with 21st-century audiences than it did in Stoppard’s heyday.

Still, what Cracknell’s staging excels at is weaving together past and present. Designer Alex Eales has turned the Old Vic into an intricate miniature galaxy, with a revolving set whose rings let the cast orbit each other like planetary bodies. There’s a beautiful naturalness to the way that their paths seem set for collision but never quite meet – leaving historical mysteries forever unsolved. In one moving, agonising moment, Septimus burns a letter from Byron without even opening it, sacrificing knowledge in favour of proving a point to the woman he’s obsessed with.

Stoppard shows us the power of learning so clearly here, in his characters’ passionate, ahead-of-their-era speeches on algorithms or the nature of time. But he also shows us all the things that hold us back from it: lust, arrogance, and the sheer randomness of fate. Spending an evening at Arcadia is sometimes like being educated by a brilliant, modestly conservative lecturer who uses the hot sauce of sex to get us eating up material that could be stodgy in other hands. Then, gradually, this play starts to feel as well as think, building to a heartbreaking ending that shows how easily passion and knowledge can burn away to nothing.

On at the Old Vic until 21 March