Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem may be sold out at the National Theatre, but its sense of arid anticlimax is dispelled by a visit to English Touring Theatre's revival of one of his last (to date) undisputed masterpieces, Arcadia (1993). Here arts, sciences and philosophy mix without apparent coercion, every argufying mouthpiece still retains a beating heart, and the deck is stacked in favour of shapely and powerful drama rather than the author's intellectual positions.
    
With its twin time tracks of the early 19th century and the present day, Arcadia may be the Stoppard play in which his penchant for self-conscious theatricality combines most smoothly with the emotional chords of the latter half of his playwriting career. Contemporary academics attempt to unravel the truth, or to construct their own hypotheses, about Lord Byron's stay at a country house, even as we also see the reality of that period (with Byron kept firmly offstage), in which the teenage daughter of the aristocratic family is revealed as a mathematical prodigy. Overlaps in action grow more and more complex; director Blanche McIntyre is inventive at gluing the two streams, so that at the climax, with both periods running simultaneously, young Thomasina and her tutor appear to be waltzing to James Brown's "It's A Man's Man's Man's World".
    
McIntyre is a skilled director, but she has not yet fully mastered blocking for large audiences. On press night in Brighton, the staging left actors in profile too often and too long, resulting in some unintelligibility when the younger women in the cast – Dakota Blue Richards in her stage debut as Thomasina and Ria Zmitrowicz as her modern-day counterpart Chloe – were facing away from part of the audience. It is not a starry cast: apart from Richards, the most recognisable face is probably Larrington Walker, last seen playing Lenny Henry's father in Rudy's Rare Records (McIntyre unfussily engages in colourblind casting among her Georgian characters). But fame is no indicator of ability, as Robert Cavanah and Flora Montgomery show in their scholastic sparring bouts and Kirsty Besterman as the wry countess of 1809. Those disappointed by, or unable to see, The Hard Problem could do far worse than to hark back to the seemingly effortless solution.
    
Written for the Financial Times.