“Arcadia”

A die-hard fan of Tom S.’s “The Real Thing”, I was excited to see “Arcadia”, another Tom S. classic, starring his son Ed. In the minutes leading up to the show, we was surrounded by excited chatter – the theatre sounded more like a pub than preview week for a West End production. Although the show contained the same play on words and language that I love in Tom S.’s work, it was all brain and no heart. The love stories play a distant second fiddle to the academic banter between the academics and the post-doc mathematics student. Ed S., the playwrite’s son, plays the part of a self-involved, absent-minded graduate student well and is sure to leave his own imprint on the contemporary theatre scene.