Arcadia

Gate Theatre, Dublin

Only Tom Stoppard could find the emotional core of his 1993 drama within a lament for the destruction of the ancient library of Alexandria. As the 19th-century child prodigy Thomasina rues the loss of innumerable Athenian holdings (“How can we sleep for grief?”), her tutor’s response comes close to encapsulating the invigorating appeal of Tom Stoppard’s extraordinary play.

“We shed as we pick up,” Septimus consoles, “like travellers who must carry everything in our arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” In Stoppard’s demanding and hugely rewarding drama of ideas, the characters who shed and those that pick up both inhabit a Derbyshire country estate, separated by two different centuries.

In 1809, Beth Cooke’s energetically enquiring Thomasina and Marty Rea’s sternly rakish Septimus ask searching questions about mathematics, literature and sex – a heady combination – while two academics in the 1990s – Ingrid Craigie’s cool historian and Andrew Whipp’s condescending don – each forage for answers to their own puzzles.

With one group thinking ahead of their time and the other groping backwards, these characters might meet somewhere in the middle. But time, Thomasina realises, is stubbornly linear. Only the play can break its rules, with Patrick Mason’s limpid, unfussy production gliding neatly back and forth between timeframes before the periods begin to blur.

Everyone here learns the laws of entropy, however. For all our progress and passion, the fire of the universe will eventually go out.

Stoppard’s play is intoxicatingly cerebral, making synaptic leaps between science and poetry, mathematics and metaphysics, free will and determinism, evidence and instinct – yet paradoxically it only threatens to confuse us the more it tries to explain itself.

When Hugh O’Conor, warmly enthusing as the mathematician Valentine, elaborates routinely on algorhythmic iteration, it only grows more distractingly opaque. Like Denis Clohessy’s music – playing its own elegant temporal games – Mason’s careful production understands the key to elucidating big ideas. Less is more.

It often feels that Stoppard has done all the work, densely laying out his themes and dictating their theatrical expression – where an apple or a tortoise can bridge the centuries, while a book’s misleading inscription will bamboozle posterity.

But it’s a play that requires a nimble cast to inhabit it, as comfortable with the entertaining Wildean comedy that begins it, the compelling thrust of ideas that fuel it, and the moving inevitability that ends it.

Craigie, whose character must be aloof but desirable, can’t always balance that difficult equation, while Whipp does a marvellous job of being likeably contemptible. If Cooke’s Thomasina seems initially stilted, it soon becomes clear that she has engagingly mapped out the unusual mind of genius, while Rea follows a similar balance between witty dispassion and emotional warmth. That is also the pivot of the play, which may deplore “the decline from thinking to feeling”, yet in this assured production, it turns a rich drama of ideas into a majestically moving experience.

It's wanting to know that makes us matter, insists Craigie's Hannah, within a play that not only finds death lurking in paradise ( Et in Arcadia ego) but even has Thomasina develop a theorem to predict the end of the universe. We must continue our searches in spite of it, Stoppard gracefully shows us, before we finally discover the proof.

Runs until July 10th