Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is that rare thing, a toothsome entertainment that also thrills us with a dozen strange thoughts before bedtime. Among its seductively odd propositions: algebra is sexy, the whole universe is destined to end up at room temperature, the missing works of Sophocles are likely to be recovered, a tortoise can make a good paperweight and carnal embrace is “the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef”. The play, in short, is a feast of ideas.

David Leveaux’s revival, the first in London since the play debuted at the National Theatre 16 years ago, shows the complexity of Stoppard’s work.

The germ of the drama is the image of a room that does not change between 1809 and the present: in the past it is home to Thomasina Coverly, a pert mathematical prodigy, and her tutor Septimus, a friend of Lord Byron, as well as the lousy erotic poet Ezra Chater and a covey of patrician wise-acres, while now it is the arena for a three-cornered contest between odious media don Bernard Nightingale, rational historian Hannah Jarvis and Valentine, Thomasina’s descendant and a rather earnest student of chaos theory. Stoppard expertly braids the tropes of country house comedy with some chewy metaphysical speculations.

Thomasina spots the incompleteness of Isaac Newton’s laws of physics, Bernard unearths what he believes to be a dirty secret in the life of Byron, and between these two poles of scientific wizardry and headline-grabbing pabulum lie subjects as disparate as the mathematics of the grouse population, horticultural fashion, the ways we fall in love and the viability of placing a newspaper advertisement to secure the services of a hermit.

The play is — if this synopsis leaves any doubt — curious, sophisticated and killingly funny. Leveaux’s production has an assured rhythm.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set is straightforwardly effective, and the performances are engaging. As Septimus, Dan Stevens oozes a sardonic sort of charm, while Samantha Bond’s Hannah is poised, and Nancy Carroll as Thomasina’s mother Lady Croom has a sharp allure.

Neil Pearson’s Bernard amuses — a whirlwind of inept sleuthing — and as Valentine the playwright’s son, Ed Stoppard, is twitchy, sensitive and watchable.

There are smart turns in the lesser roles, too (George Potts’s Chater especially enjoyable), and only Jessie Cave’s grating Thomasina disappoints —though she is touching at the play’s close. It is often alleged that Stoppard’s work is all head and no heart. Arcadia demonstrates that he is in fact a scholar of the emotions, as well as of thermodynamics and the byways of 19th-century literary squabbles. Leveaux’s revival confirms this is Stoppard’s finest play — highlighting its intellectual substance, and at the same time revelling both in its wit and in the tragic uncertainties of our quantum universe.
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