Arcadia

This is Tom Stoppard's award-winning play, set in Derbyshire. The orderly classicism of Lady Croom's Capability Brown grounds are being turned into picturesque romantic chaos, as fashion dictates, by landscape architect Culpability Noakes. In a Regency room overlooking the work is Lady Croom's brilliant adolescent daughter - Thomasina Coverly, with her handsome, clever tutor Septimus Hodge. Their maths lesson is disturbed by, among others, the imperious, amorous Lady Croom and Ezra Chater, a cuckold and minor poet, determined on satisfaction. One hundred and eighty years later, in the same room, a corresponding group, comprising a mathematician, a biographer/historian, and a vulgar academic, try to unravel the events of 1809 - with spectacularly wrong results.