Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia left me cold – I couldn’t wait for it to end ...Middle East

I was still at school when I saw the 1993 National Theatre premiere production of what is widely considered to be the late Sir Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece. Like most audience members, I was dazzled and puzzled in equal measure by his dizzying marriage of chaos theory and human emotion, Fermat’s Last Theorem and sexual desire across two time periods in the same Derbyshire country house.

The 2009 West End revival, featuring an exquisitely nuanced performance from Stoppard’s actor son Ed, revealed added layers of humanity in this towering feat of mathematical and scientific research. This new iteration, however, left me almost entirely cold.

The Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration offers delightful viewing intimacy but exceedingly limited design possibilities, a factor that does not work in Arcadia’s favour. We long to have occasional glimpses of the elegant house and, above all, its much-discussed garden; instead, all we get is a lit atomic model mobile suspended over the stage.

Stripped of all décor, the play appears ever more daunting and ever less dramatic and in the underpowered first half of Carrie Cracknell’s production the atmosphere falls dangerously flat. Too often it becomes a seemingly never-ending lecture and we the poor students trapped inside the lecture hall.

There’s a slight improvement in the second half, as characters and themes from 1809 and the present day start to interweave sinuously, yet the overall mood remains one of wearying affectation and I will freely admit that I was longing for the play to end.

In 1809, lively 13-year-old maths prodigy Thomasina Coverly (Isis Hainsworth) is tutored by the dashing Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane), a friend of the much-mentioned but unseen Lord Byron, who has attracted the attention of all the ladies, including Thomasina’s mother, Lady Croom (Fiona Button). In the present, two warring academics, Hannah Jarvis (Leila Farzad) and Bernard Nightingale (Prasanna Panorama), push rival theories about what happened back in 1809 and debate whether there was actually a hermit living in the picturesque hermitage that Lady Croom’s new garden design involved. And if so, who was he?

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Hainsworth, a reliably excellent performer, brings light and loveliness to Thomasina’s formidable intellect; this young woman might be fiendishly good at maths, but what it comes to matters of love and dancing a waltz, she’s a tentative novice. Button, perking up every scene she’s in, gives the evening’s spikiest and sparkiest performance.

Yet the present day works far less well, as the battle between Jarvis and a strangely fey Nightingale stubbornly fails to ignite into anything meaningful and we struggle to comprehend their relationship to each other and to the Coverley family, the current-day owners of the house.

Stoppard’s theme is the difficulty of us ever accurately knowing the past, of understanding the human dynamics behind whatever words or drawings might be left to us. As for me, I enjoyed Arcadia considerably more in the past than I did in the present.

To 21 March (0344 871 7628, Old Vic Theatre, London oldvictheatre.com )

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