Arcadia **** TNT

Friday 24 July 2009 16:09 GMT

Quite simply, this is a brilliant play by a brilliant playwright – but you’ll need to keep your wits about you to keep up with Tom Stoppard’s dazzling playfulness.

One elegant set, two time periods centuries apart, a precocious aristocrat and her randy tutor (Dan Stevens), a tortoise, a hermit, landscape gardening, thermodynamics, Byron, and a cuckolded poet are just some of the ingredients stirred into the mix.

Delightfully witty, it’s a joy from start to finish with notable performances by Nancy Carroll as a 19th-century lady of the house, Ed Stoppard as a sensitive mathematician trying to plot the habits of grouse, and Samantha Bond and Neil Pearson, a pair of sparring academics proving that making sense of the past is as fraught as predicting the future.

Duke of York’s, St Martin’s Ln, WC2N 4BG Leicester Square (0870 060 6623). Until Sep 12. £15-£49.50