Tom Stoppard's 1993 masterpiece, Arcadia, is a dazzling intellectual conceit which skips back-and-forth between the Regency era and the present, alighting upon themes as disparate as chaos theory, Romanticism and landscape gardening.
Hannah Jarvis is a garden historian investigating the transformation of a Derbyshire estate from geometric flower beds and fountains to faux-romantic wilderness. The great 18th-century gardeners, she explains, were recreating 17th-century landscape painters who were themselves evoking a classical idyll, "so you have Capability Brown doing Claude doing Virgil".
Her pet theory is that the park's hermitage came with a full-time hermit, salaried to sit on the horizon like a living ornament. It is a nice idea, had Stoppard not already shown an episode 200 years earlier, when the young mistress of the house sees the folly on the original plans and pencils in a little inhabitant.
It is typical of Stoppard to set up an elaborate academic guessing-game by giving away the answer first. But if Trevor Nunn's original National Theatre production was a meditation on irrational impulse versus scientific enquiry, Terry Hand's revival is an up-tempo satire on academic vanity.
Hannah's peaceful researches are thoroughly spoiled by the arrival of Bernard, a bumptious media don pursuing a belief that Byron set foot on the estate with his duelling pistols at the ready. In the roles of the antagonistic academics, Vivien Parry and Steven Elliott enjoy a spirited intellectual squabble-cum-flirtation.
There's fine work from Caryl Morgan as the 18th-century prodigy whose chance discovery of the second law of thermodynamics is thwarted only through lack of paper. Connecting all the elements and time-frames is tricky, yet Hands' production successfully negotiates the conceptual gap between Stoppard's train of thought and its platform.
· Until March 3. Box office: 0845 330 3565.
