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Arcadia

Published Friday 5 June 2009 at 12:05 by John Thaxter

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia makes its audiences feel almost as clever as its author - a complex literary, mathematical and scientific romp set in a Derbyshire country house that perfectly matches his aim to create a marriage of high ideas and high comedy.

David Leveaux’s airy revival, the first since Trevor Nunn’s premiere production transferred to the Haymarket in 1994, is a treat long overdue, one that follows the original staging in almost every respect except scale - even the lofty programme notes are a lift from the NT original.

But the loss of space on the narrow Duke of York’s stage offers a more cramped view of parallel lives in two centuries: from 1809 when Byron seems to have made a brief visit to Sidley Hall to shoot a hare, to the present day when a couple of literati, played with impish delight by Neil Pearson as a pushy Sussex scholar and Samantha Bond as his doubting amateur historian, tussle wrong-headedly with letters and memoirs linked to the poet, who had soon after fled to foreign parts.

Designer Hildegard Bechtler provides an under-furnished classic setting with echoing hard walls that can blur higher-pitched voices, notably Jessie Cave as the precocious scholar Thomasina, cleverly doodling over her concepts of thermodynamics, sex and chaos theory, to the delight of her live-in tutor Septimus, played with debonair charm by rising stage star Dan Stevens.

Two centuries later Ed Stoppard is Thomasina’s 21st-century equivalent, a scientific egghead wedded to his Mac laptop with iterative algorithms that link him directly to his luckless ancestress.

The evening’s outstanding performance is Nancy Carroll’s aristocratic Lady Croom, a dazzling, silk-clad beauty with a razor sharp wit that delights with its cool, droll delivery, her stylish portrayal brilliantly offset by the broader comic playing of Pearson and Bond as combative literary lions who finally resolve their differences somewhere offstage.

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