Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, named by the Royal Institution one of the best science-related works ever written, transferred from The Old Vic to the Duke of York's Theatre, reconfigured into the round.
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia transferred from The Old Vic to the Duke of York’s Theatre in Covent Garden from Saturday 20 June to Saturday 12 September 2026, in Carrie Cracknell’s staging.
Stoppard set the play on a Derbyshire estate in two periods, 1809 and the present. A teenage mathematical prodigy, Thomasina Coverly, has ideas about chaos and thermodynamics that run years ahead of the science.
Present-day scholars piece her story together, among them the author Hannah Jarvis, who investigates a chapter in Lord Byron’s life. In a subplot, the estate’s gardener remakes its grounds from ordered Arcadian style to Gothic wilderness, staging the play’s argument about order giving way to disorder.
The play premiered in the National Theatre’s Lyttelton auditorium on 13 April 1993, and in 2006 the Royal Institution named it one of the best science-related works ever written. Stoppard’s other plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, and he received eight Evening Standard Awards and five Tony Awards.
The Old Vic produced the transfer itself, taking its own staging into a West End house and reconfiguring it into the round. The two centuries share the stage only in the final scene.