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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Nick Curtis

Arcadia at the Old Vic review: a fitting tribute to Tom Stoppard's genius

Tom Stoppard The Old Vic Arcadia Carrie Cracknell Isis Hainsworth Leila Farzad Prasanna Puwanarajah Mathematics

This prodigious, teemingly intelligent, breezily witty 1993 play by Tom Stoppard packs in more challenging matter than most writers would attempt in a lifetime but has the seeming effortlessness of pure entertainment.

It embraces thermodynamics, poetry, landscape design, sex and much more besides, in parallel timelines set in the 1990s and the early 1800s in one room of a Derbyshire country house. Carrie Cracknell’s superbly cast and elegantly realised in-the-round revival is a fitting tribute to the genius of Stoppard, who died last November aged 88.

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