ANSWERING LIFE'S BIG QUESTIONS...

ARCADIA THE OLD VIC UNTIL MARCH 21 oldvictheatre.com

- With STEFAN KYRIAZIS

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is earthily hilarious and dazzlingly profound. It’s also cosmically brain-frying with talk of iterated algorithms and chaos theory.

Sparcely staged on a revolve under an ellipsis studded with hanging globes like atoms or stars, it's a play of two halves in every sense. Set concurrently in the same palatial country home in 1809 and the 1980s, the period scenes are a blast while the modern chunks feel rather laboured.