Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia educates but does not lecture, asks questions without demanding answers and takes itself seriously, while also taking the piss. Although this is a show of ideas, Stoppard lets his characters ask the play’s big questions. He injects them with his own insatiable zest for knowledge, sets them loose on-stage and invites us to watch them tussle for truth and understanding. It makes for an utterly absorbing and accessible production, which inspires us to apply the play’s timeless questions to our own lives off-stage.

The play is split between the late 18th and 20th centuries, with both halves located in the world of intellectual pursuit. Rarely have so many smart characters shared the stage. It is intellectual curiosity that connects them, with their ideas, desires and theories, folding back on each other across the centuries. Most of them are looking for answers: precocious student Thomasina is struggling to convert nature’s patterns into linear equations and her descendant Valentine is grappling with similar mathematical dilemmas. Media don Bernard Nightingale is desperate to prove Byron’s presence at Thomasina’s home, while novelist Hannah thinks she’s found her next book in Thomasina’s gardens. Few find what they’re looking for, but it is the race for answers that captivates, with the characters’ curiosity re-igniting our own. Stoppard reminds us ‘it is wanting to know that makes us matter’.

The actors make light work of this dense script and the banter flies elegantly between them. Dan Stevens is excellent as self-possessed tutor Septimus Hodge - a man who looks to books and not experience for the answers to life’s questions. Ed Stoppard’s Valentine comes across as an extraordinarily delicate chap, so engrossed in the world of numbers, that the bustle of real-life is near unbearable. One believes Stevens because he seems to understand the script and Stoppard because he feels it.

The only thing missing here –perhaps not surprising from a playwright frequently labelled all head and no heart – is any churning emotion. Though Thomasina’s adoration of dashing tutor Septimus powers the plot towards its fiery conclusion, their relationship takes an age to warm up. And whilst Stevens simmers nicely with Septimus’ unfulfilled passion, Nancy Carroll is having too much fun with her sparky script to extract any feeling between the two.

Still, one leaves the show reeling - the brain buzzing even if the heart isn’t quite soaring – determined to question everything we once held true, to examine life anew and revel in all its certain uncertainties.

Till 12 September 2009