Arcadia
The Tobacco Factory, Bristol
5/5

ANDREW HILTON directs his first non-Shakespearean play at the Tobacco Factory with the same clarity of depiction that characterises all his work.

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia demands such an approach if its complex intertwining of ideas, artistic styles and exploration of knowledge is to be fully appreciated.

The setting, a room at Sidley Park in 1809 and the same room now, is dominated by a grand table where poetry, geometry, garden designs, history and sex are discussed and fought over.

The inhabitants of both rooms mirror the roles and relationships across the two centuries, fragments of conversations and even costumes are echoed down through time.

The modern era attempts to reconstruct the events of the earlier period, suggesting an algorithmic approach to comprehending the world, reflected in the studies of two of the central characters from the contrasting eras.

This may make the production sound dry and hard work. But Stoppard’s wit and eccentric characters are enthusiastically grasped by Hilton’s 12-strong cast.

Piers Wehner’s 19th-century Byronesque tutor charismatically dominates early scenes expounding and expanding on knowledge and sex to the Sidley Park household, while Matthew Thomas’s modern-day populist academic mirrors the role in a flamboyant, self-aggrandising manner as he reconstructs earlier events to fit his thesis.

The aloof Lady Croon (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) generates much of the humour with her sarcastic, Wildean wit in the 19th-century scenes, as do the interactions between Hannah Lee’s insightful student and her tutor.

Nearly always though, the humour is there to elucidate the ideas being debated and aid the play’s unravelling, allowing the past to gradually be refocused and refined by the present and knowledge revisited and reshaped.

Hinton’s production clearly reveals Stoppard’s central tenet that the heat of relationships confuses any scientific or mathematical grasp of the reality.

But at the heart, “wanting to know makes us matter,” is what really drives the energy and clarity of this production.

Runs until May 3. Box office: (0117) 902-0344.