Events at a Derbyshire country house in 1809 – involving a maths prodigy child, rival poets, a libidinous aristocrat, a hermitage and a tortoise – are investigated 180 years later by residents there.

First seen at the National Theatre in 1993, Arcadia – a time-crossing tragi-comedy about poetry and quantum physics but above all love – represented an exact midpoint in Sir Tom Stoppard’s career. It opened 27 years after the Edinburgh premiere of his first full-length play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and 27 years before the West End debut of Leopoldstadt, a late reckoning with his Jewish heritage that – after Sir Tom’s death, aged 88, last November – must alas be accounted his last. Arcadia was also pivotal in another way. The previous Stoppard – Hapgood, which used spying as a metaphor for quantum physics, or possibly the reverse – had a disappointing response from critics and ticket-buyers.

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