Date/Time: Wednesday, 26th August 2026 at 13:30
Location: Duke of York's Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London, WC2N 4BG
Price: £56 per person. Member and guest £112.
Event Organiser: Pete Wells. 7 Wayfaring Court, Safflower Lane, Harold Wood RM3 0LQ
Often regarded as Tom Stoppard‘s finest play, Arcadia is about life, the universe and everything!
The play 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 conversing amicably with her tutor Septimus Hodge. 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.
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.
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