Arcadia review – love, gardening and Euclidian geometry collide in Tom Stoppard’s cosmic masterpiece

Stuffed with knowledge and often regarded as the playwright’s finest work, this drama’s sheer cleverness gleams in an exuberant production

When Tom Stoppard was asked what this play was about, just as it streaked its meteoric path from London to New York in the 1990s, he called it a drama of romance, mathematics, landscape gardening and Byron. It doesn’t quite cover it. Often regarded as his finest, Arcadia is about life, the universe and everything, to borrow a phrase.

It takes place in a single room, across time, alternately filled with a 19th-century past and a parallel setting in the 1980s. Director Carrie Cracknell suggests these worlds are a hair’s-breadth away from an encounter, virtually brushing past each other as they go. It opens with teenage prodigy Thomasina Coverly (Isis Hainsworth) conversing amicably with her tutor Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane). The ping-pong of their dialogue is amusing but heartfelt. The mysteries of the world that Thomasina seeks to solve through algebraic equation are accompanied by a slow flirtation between them and the romance that grows is tender, sparky and moving.

Their scenes are set beside academics in the play’s present-day, hunting for Thomasina’s lost story and a strand involving the roguish Romantic Lord Byron, as well as the estate’s unknown 19th-century hermit.

Stoppard, in the same interview, spoke about the sense of a detective story at play in Arcadia and Cracknell’s production carries a lovely searching quality so it seems like a twist on the country-house drama with cerebral intrigues and intellectual piques – even if the story builds towards a conclusion that never arrives.

There is an off-stage garden that insinuates itself in the room and the off-stage figure of Byron too, never seen but often referred to in connection with a stinking literary review, a duel and subsequent disappearance.

Alex Eales’ elegant set turns the single room into a galaxy with overhanging planetary ellipses and oversized atoms. Staged with a barely perceptible revolve, its movement seems to mimic the turning of the Earth in miniature. Characters discuss thermodynamics, Euclidian geometry, poetry versus science, the algebra of a leaf, and so on. These ideas glimmer like conceptual holograms, wavering before you, just out of reach. Actors bring even the most arcane lines to life with a spirit of playful romance between them.

This is a drama about knowledge, and hermeneutics, in which some of its science feels just beyond your understanding. Rather than raising frustration, the unknown languages of Newtonian physics and mathematics gleam with the sense of a playwright tossing about complex ideas with such excitement, dexterity and depth that it doesn’t matter whether you understand them.

Or up to a point, at least. Everyone here is so clever, from the winningly precocious Thomasina to Stoppard himself that it can make your head hurt with its abstraction, intelligence and cerebral intensity.

The present-day scenario is weaker in its drama and more glib by contrast. “This is not science, this is storytelling,” says Septimus, but it does not always feel that way in these scenes. They stall the pace of the play, which stands still as characters talk out ideas on scholarship. There is not the same tender chemistry in the modern world of academic jousting and flirtation either, despite (or maybe because of) the crass passes made by bombastic scholar Bernard Nightingale (Prasanna Puwanarajah) on star academic Hannah Jarvis (Leila Farzad). Worse are his jokey put downs: “silly bitch” and “silly cow”.

This aside, the production has an inbuilt exuberance and is invigoratingly realised. It’s like a complicated piece of algebra, exquisite in its difficulties, unsolvable to the end.

• At the Old Vic, London, until 21 March