The popularity of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia owes a great deal to the play’s brilliant weave of themes and ideas, outlined by characters from two different historical periods – Romantic and modern. There is breathtaking brio in the way the writer’s skill combines so many strands, with both humour and irony: from the mathematics of Fermat’s theorem to the exploration of fractals, and from the limits of rationalism to the flights of fancy that inhabit science just as much as poetry.This is director Andrew Hilton’s first venture into contemporary theatre – he has mostly tackled Shakespeare, but also Read more ...

These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those Read more ...

How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...

Joe Wright’s screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s giant of a masterpiece, scripted by Tom Stoppard, takes a big risk that pays off: the many-layered late 19th-century novel is stripped to its bare bones with astonishing brio. He sets most of the story in a theatre, playing with the illusion created by a proscenium arch and the mirrored worlds of audience and stage. On paper, the whole thing sounds absurdly gimmicky, but Wright has a feel for both literature and cinema and his translation of a cherished classic into a piece of dazzling film works wonders with a genre that often drains literary Read more ...

"There used to be among families...a position, a certain...call it 'parade'." So stammered Benedict Cumberbatch's rigidly principled, increasingly broken Christopher Tietjens at the climax of last week's penultimate Parade's End, echoing his own line from the series' first episode as he struggled to justify his fidelity to adulterous wife Sylvia (Rebecca Hall).In the kind of verbally shrewd reversal that has defined Tom Stoppard's meticulous, occasionally magnificent script, a frustrated General Campion told him "there are no more parades for that regiment". Tietjens was the last Read more ...

A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”. But for all the deliberate theatrical artifice of a movie about a society that knows a thing or two about putting itself on display, the delicious paradox of the occasion is this: in framing his Tolstoy adaptation as if it were a piece of theatre, Wright has made the least stagey film imaginable.Staginess, in any case, has less to do with sets than a state of mind, and there’s no doubt from the off that Read more ...

“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page realist novel and choke it in the grip of meta-theatrical conceptualising and Brechtian by-play. Anna Karenina feels as though its director just discovered the fourth wall and felt the need to graffiti all over it: “Joe Wright woz ere.”Apparently it was all a question of budget. Denied expansive tracking shots of snow-covered vistas and bustling St Read more ...

The verdict may still be out on the BBC’s lavish unfolding drama, Parade’s End, but it’s already done one thing: to bring the name of its writer, Ford Madox Ford, back from the (relative) oblivion where it has been since his death in 1939 (not least thanks to a script from Tom Stoppard). The novel for which he is best known, The Good Soldier (with its immortal opening line, “this is the saddest story I have ever heard”), has always hovered on various lists of best-ever books, but often rather in the lower ranks. With Who On Earth Was Ford Madox Ford?, a Culture Show Special fronted by Alan Read more ...

Television schedules seem not to matter much any more, since we can now watch on repeat more or less any time we choose. But it still seems strange that the BBC are airing their new five-part period drama, which is part-funded by the HBO network to the tune of £12 million, on a Friday evening in the middle of August – even though it’s turned out to be ideal weather for staying in. And Parade’s End ticks all the right boxes, too – all bar one, perhaps: it’s lovely to look at, it features a top-drawer British cast, and there’s the screenplay by Tom Stoppard.In other words it reeks of serious Read more ...

In Rock’n’Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermit. The other, Václav Havel, gave up the life of an internationally acclaimed, domestically banned playwright to become a head of state. Only one of them was in the audience for the premiere at the Royal Court. And it wasn’t the hermit.A few days later, I had the great privilege of interviewing the dissident playwright who took the Czech Republic into NATO. The accidental president cut an unpresidential figure Read more ...

Lightning hasn't quite struck twice at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where Trevor Nunn's dazzling reclamation of early Terence Rattigan (Flare Path) has been followed by the same director's transfer from Chichester of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard's first play. How does this 1966 gloss on Hamlet by way of Beckett hold up today? Engagingly enough, not least when its two tireless leads are in full existentialist flow. But some may nonetheless feel a degree of exhaustion, however much they'll want to cheer Samuel Barnett and Jamie Parker on.I remember being knocked sideways Read more ...

By general consent, The Real Thing expresses an almost perfect balance between the brilliance of its dialogue and the ideas examined on one hand, and the depth and range of human feelings on the other. Anna Mackmin’s brisk and dynamic take on the play, first performed nearly 30 years ago, to a large extent succeeds in recontextualising what is surely a classic, for a subsequent generation of viewers.Viewers rather than theatre-goers perhaps, because one of the principal differences between the cultural baggage of those who would have seen the first production at the Strand Theatre in Read more ...