Arcadia, Duke of York’s Theatre, London

Opening as the news is dominated by grubby goings-on in parliament, David Leveaux’s lucid revival of Tom Stoppard’s dazzling 1993 play comes as a breath of fresh air. It is like having the windows flung open in a stuffy room. The depth, breadth and scope of the play are exhilarating, but what is so moving about it is its combination of head and heart: its passionate celebration of the human thirst for knowledge and desire to put a shape on the world.

The play never moves from one room in a Derbyshire stately home but the double timeframe enables it to travel far and wide, zipping back and forth between 1809 and the present day. In the past we find Thomasina, a teenage maths genius, and her tutor Septimus Hodge. Around them whirls an intrigue of poetic rivalry, gardening upheaval and “carnal embrace” in the gazebo. Napoleon is agitating on the continent; Lord Byron is bustling in the bedroom. Out in the grounds, gardener Mr Noakes proposes replacing Capability Brown’s calm ordering of nature with a wild array of crags, waterfalls and follies.

Cut to the 21st century and the contemporary inhabitants of the room try to decipher the past. One visiting academic sees in the transformation of the garden “the nervous breakdown” of the Romantic movement; another spies in Byron’s presence the clue to his sudden flight to Lisbon. They are distracted, however, by the confusions of lust and academic rivalry. The oldest son of the house, meanwhile, is a postgraduate student working on the algebraic patterns that Thomasina spotted but did not have the means to develop, neither the calculator nor the computer having been invented.

Those in the past try to map the future; those in the present try to read the past. Art and science, man and nature, predictability and unpredictability, romanticism and classicism, intellect and passion: Stoppard lines up supposed opposites and shows how they collide and overlap. The audience, given the privilege of cheating time, is able to piece together patterns in a way the characters cannot achieve. We see the reach of intellectual endeavour curtailed by the time or place of birth, but we also see the baton passed on. This is immensely poignant, as is the one constant in both periods: the unfathomable factor of sudden, unexpected love.

Not everything is perfect in Leveaux’s production. It is slightly starchy at the beginning and then seems to rush towards the end. The significant revelation of what did happen in the past, and why, does not quite have its weight (Jessie Cave’s Thomasina does not mature, as she needs to). And the moving final image of two couples, one past, one present, waltzing towards the dark could be held longer, letting its bittersweet significance settle on us. But Leveaux and his cast embrace the wit of the piece and the staging is full of excellent, vibrant performances, particularly Neil Pearson as the raffish academic, Bernard, Samantha Bond as his sceptical adversary, Dan Stevens as the droll tutor and Ed Stoppard as the intense postgraduate.

There are some enjoyably absurd scenes: in the 19th century, the moment when Septimus realises that his haughty employer, Lady Crooms (Nancy Carroll), is propositioning him; in the 21st, Bernard’s try-out of the barnstorming lecture with which he hopes to wow the academic world. And Hildegard Bechtler’s set elegantly frames the action. Delicately lit by Paul Anderson, it suggests not just the garden outside but a wider vista, in keeping with the reach of this rich play. ★★★★☆

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