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.