Last Updated on February 5, 2026
Heaven Is a Place on Earth
5.0 out of 5.0 starsThe critical consensus considers Arcadia to be the late Tom Stoppard’s most brilliant play. Tonight is the press night for Arcadia’s second major London revival at the playwright’s home from home, The Old Vic, where he made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. An extremely witty and intellectually dazzling masterpiece, Arcadia, in typical Stoppardian fashion, examines man’s drive to impose systems of order and disorder on the world, the dialectical tension that exists between art and science, sex, the laws of thermodynamics, chaos theory and landscape gardening, amongst many other popular dinner table subjects.
Arcadia’s narrative runs on two separate timelines in the same location, eventually converging in a quantum mash-up as past and present collide. Set in Sidley Park, the country seat of the aristocratic Coverly family, the play opens in 1809. Lady Thomasina Coverly is a precocious 16-year-old visionary mathematician whose extraordinary mind predicts the second law of thermodynamics, fractals and chaos theory. The character may be based on Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, who worked on Charles Babbage’s early research into computing. Byron is also a character in Arcadia, but an unseen one, his rakish activities motivating several of the characters. Thomasina is tutored by Septimus Hodge, a schoolfriend of Byron, who recognises and encourages her genius. There are hierarchies of class at play between the aristocrats, their paid servants and tutors and the guests drawn from the artistic milieu of the time. The story centres around Thomasina’s coming of age both emotionally and intellectually, and the sexual shenanigans and resultant jealousies of the Sidley Park’s occupants.
The second timeline operates in an early 1990s present. Three modern-day Coverly siblings, Oxford post-grad Valentine, who is studying mathematical biology, Goth-lite ingenue Chloë, played by a charmingly gawky Holly Godliman, and the non-verbal Gus, are joined at Sidley Park by historic garden writer Hannah Jarvis and an unscrupulous Sussex University professor Bernard Nightingale. The latter pair are both researching stories surrounding the period of the first timeline at the house. Again, sexual and intellectual tensions drive the plot as the protagonists try to uncover the hidden mysteries of the earlier time period.
Director Carrie Cracknell has staged Arcadia in the round, using a circular rotating stage that creates a sense of intimacy with the characters, as well as a restless unpredictability and intellectual uncertainty that permeate the piece. The stage’s flooring is decorated with a design that suggests an Aristotelian vision of the universe, a symbolic metaphor for a more certain world before the known unknowns of contemporary science. The period characters are dressed in Regency style, with the women in Empire line dresses and the men in Beau Brummell-esque cravats and waistcoats. Stoppard’s writing is packed to the brim with jokes, which leaven the debates about science and historical veracity that drive the narrative; but his genius is in the way he creates a web of meaning, bringing together the theoretical with the personal into a continuum under the overarching theme of how randomness is both predictable and structured. The drama develops using elements of fractal and chaos theories in a piece of virtuoso writing, an intellectual high-wire act, which this fine ensemble cast delivers with confidence and at a pace that allows the audience to follow the complex arguments presented with some modicum of understanding.
Prasanna Puwanarajah is brilliant as Sussex media don Bernard Nightingale, a slippery fish undone by his own vanity and ambition. He cavorts around the stage, making indecent proposals both academic and sexual, and seeing which will stick. For him, the academic space is a playground of ideas to be manipulated and discarded. But Nightingale is also the voice for art, trumping Angus Cooper’s Valentine’s defence of the rigour of the scientific method with a quote from Byron and destroying Valentine’s desire for rationality – ‘I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars—big bangs, black holes—who gives a shit?’
Cooper is the straight man in this bear pit of competing egos, struggling to manage his feelings for Leila Farzad’s Hannah Jarvis whilst feeding his pet tortoise and attempting to find a sense of order in his own research, searching for recurring patterns in the records of Sidley Park’s game book. It is a performance that is finely tuned and sensitively played.
The unsympathetic character of Jarvis jars to a contemporary eye. She is presented as a sexually repressed academic, unable to engage emotionally or sexually, whilst being an object of desire for Valentine, who jokingly refers to her as his ‘fiancé’, the lascivious Nightingale, and even for the mute teenage genius Gus, played with a fierce intensity by William Lawlor. Maybe the ladies’ man Stoppard was getting his own back on some feminist who didn’t fall for his undoubted charms?
The Regency-era characters are no less entangled than contemporary ones. Isis Hainsworth, as the ponytailed Thomasina Coverly, blossoms beautifully as she moves from girlhood into young womanhood, desperate to learn to waltz. It is her ability to predict future theoretical developments and couch them in simple terms that makes the character so interesting, and Hainsworth makes her character’s precocity credible. Thomasina uses a rice pudding analogy to predict entropy, saying ‘You cannot stir things apart’.
For her tutor Septimus, intellectually outflanked by his charge, ‘This is not science. This is storytelling.’ Seamus Dillane gives a sympathetic portrayal of Septimus, brilliant enough to recognise his own limitations and to find temporary solace in random physical couplings. ‘When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone on the empty shore.’
The smaller parts are similarly finely drawn and nuanced. Gabriel Akuwudike, as landscape gardener Richard Noakes, tasked with transforming Sidley Park’s formal gardens into an Arcadian ideal of faux-naturalism, deals stoically with opposition from all quarters, as well as with intellectual (‘The Gothic novel in landscape’) and class-based snobbery.
Fiona Button gives us a pleasingly narcissistic Lady Croom, bemused by her daughter’s brilliance, whilst being impatient to marry Thomasina off so she can get on with her own amours. She has many of the best lines in the play, telling Septimus, ‘As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance’, all delivered with a delicious sense of entitlement.
Tim Frances delivers a stentorian performance as the all-seeing and eminently corruptible butler Jellaby, and Matthew Steer brings a Shakespearean depth of character to the role of the third-rate poet Ezra Chater, a foolish cuckold, brittle and shallow.
With Stoppard recently shuffling off this mortal coil, the author’s literary canonisation is ongoing. His plays certainly tickle the toes of the theatre-going classes, impressing with their erudition and humour, but there is also a much deeper understanding of humanity on display, a holistic view of our triumphs and fallibilities and a way of creating interconnections that illuminate our understanding of the world. This production of Arcadia does justice to this modern masterpiece, allowing the text to speak and its inner poetry to emerge.
24th January – 21st March 2026
The Old Vic,
The Cut,
London
SE1 8NB
Check our preview of Bankside and Southbank Theatre for more recommendations
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