Arcadia – The Old Vic, London

Writer: Tom Stoppard

Director: Carrie Cracknell

 Go and see the new production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at The Old Vic for the sheer beauty of it. The theatre itself has been transformed so it all takes place in the round, and Alex Eales’ set itself is a thing of elegance and beauty. There’s a circular stage with a double revolve above which hang planet-like globes of light. It’s somewhere between an astrolabe and an orrery brought to life – an apt visual image for the Enlightenment ideas touched on in the play.

But the self-conscious intellectualism of the 33-year-old play itself now feels decidedly dated. And there’s no way it can be modernised. Stoppard’s twin time periods of the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries are vital to the play’s economy. Nor, it seems, can the text be usefully cut. You might wish to excise some of Stoppard’s more tiresome whimsy – all that stuff about the tortoise and the hare, for example. But as all his references are embedded in other references, which are vital to the plot, it’s probably impossible to do.

Carrie Cracknell gives little hint of what it is that this new production is really exploring. The solemn glossary in the programme, which offers explanations of everything from classicism to chaos theory, suggests that she lacks confidence that the play’s multitude of abstract concepts will work for a contemporary audience.

In an attempt to get the cast to articulate Stoppard’s quick-fire dialogue with clarity, they are made to enunciate clearly, so that the pace of the first half is far too stately. Stoppard’s script is one joke after another, but there are few laughs in the early scenes.

Possibly, Cracknell has deliberately dialled down the more sexually predatory aspects of the play’s young(ish) men. So louche academic, Bernard Nightingale, is played rather apologetically by Prasanna Puwanarajah. Plus, the whole scholarly thing now feels like something from a bygone age, with Nightingale pursuing some hare-brained idea about Byron and a supposed duel taking place in a grand house where the play takes place. Thomasina’s tutor, Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane), is also supposed to be a loveable rogue, shamelessly seducing a house guest in various picturesque sites around the grounds. Here, he is made more twinkly than he appears on the page, particularly in the final scenes, where Stoppard’s stage directions for a ‘decorous distance’ between him and Thomasina are ignored to allow a full-blown love scene.

The female characters come off rather better, in particular Isis Hainsworth’s Thomasina, who transforms before our eyes from naïve 13-year-old to poised young woman. Hannah Jarvis, played by Leila Farzad, is another poised, intensely watchable character. But most compelling of all is Fiona Button as Lady Croom. There’s a touch of Lady Bracknell in her imperious moods, but so too she can be flirtatious and funny.

Like all Stoppard plays, Arcadia is very, very wordy. This production works best when the pace speeds up, as it does in the second half, with actors able to fully embrace the play’s farcical nature.

Runs until 21 March 2026