Isis Hainsworth is one of the breakout stars of director Carrie Cracknell’s new version of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, which has just transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre after a triumphant run at the Old Vic. Hainsworth has to be seen to be believed in the role of teenage maths prodigy Thomasina Coverly, for which she was Olivier-nominated. She is the heart and soul of a funny, tragic and head-spinningly clever play that touches on chaos theory, determinism, thermodynamics, Romanticism and much more besides.
“I was really intimidated by Arcadia before we started, because it’s so huge, there’s so much language and science and maths are my worst subjects,” says Hainsworth, who is dyslexic. “I was also a bit nervous about playing a child, which could be really easy to slip into stereotypical child acting that I find excruciating.”
The play is set in a Derbyshire country estate and switches between the present and 1809, when Thomasina is under the tutelage of Septimus Hodge (played by Seamus Dillane), an academic friend of Lord Byron’s. Hodge comes to realise that his student is a prodigy, something which is further illuminated by characters in the present who are tracing back her discoveries and the dramatic timeline of events surrounding them.
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She is very much ahead of her time, a young genius,” says Hainsworth. “I did research into [pioneering mathematician] Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron’s daughter and research into young women’s lives back then. But the play is not just intimidating maths and science, there’s sex and mishaps and a beautiful meetings of hearts and minds too, which really drew me towards it.”
“The play is not just intimidating maths and science, there’s sex and mishaps”
Hainsworth, from Edinburgh, threw herself into dancing at a young age. After success in local theatre groups she was cast in Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour on the West End when she was 18 and subsequently moved down to London. She found work on TV — In Plain Sight and Harlots — while winning acclaim on stage in the likes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge. The Olivier nomination for Arcadia is now putting further acceleration to her career, with this new run in the West End set to continue thrilling audiences.
“The cast is about 50-50 with new people, the new joiners as we’re calling them,” she says. “It’s weird and exciting to go back and think what did I do in this scene, and can I try and make it better? The Old Vic in the winter was incredible, but now the West End during the summer is going to be a different vibe. It’s nice that we’re doing it without a huge star, which is rare for the West End at the moment. Tom Stoppard is basically our star.”
Arcadia is at the Duke of York’s Theatre until September 12
