Arcadia Tickets

The tiny Gate Theatre, for many years situated above a pub in Notting Hill, has an illustrious alumni of artistic directors. It was where Stephen Daldry got noticed before taking on the Royal Court, where David Farr (who wrote the Night Manager) was AD in the mid-nineties, and in the early 2000s you would have found Erica Whyman, who went on to lead the RSC. 

One of the theatre’s most intriguing periods took place between 2007-12 when the theatre was run by two young women, Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell, whose playful, eclectic programming embraced everything from classic drama to movement- and dance-based work. Every time you stepped through the door of the theatre, you were surprised. Frequently delighted too. 

“The Gate was the place where I learnt to trust my own taste and build a relationship between what we were making and the audience,” recalls Carrie Cracknell, who has gone on to make a successful career as an associate and freelance director. Cracknell’s in-the-round revival of Tom Stoppard’s thrilling firecracker of a play about chaos theory, gardening and affairs of the heart, Arcadia, is transferring from the Old Vic to the Duke of York’s this month. It is the same theatre which hosted Cracknell’s game-changing version of A Doll’s House with Hattie Morahan.

When you run a theatre, you can pick and choose the plays you direct, but it is a harder path to navigate artistic ambition as a freelancer, but one that Cracknell has steered well over a career which has included a mesmerising The Deep Blue Sea with Helen McCrory at the National, where she also staged Polly Stenham’s Julie and, most recently, The Grapes of Wrath. 

“The question I have to ask myself each time is, 'Does it excite me and is there room for authorship?'" says Cracknell, who says that one of the things she now understands is that to sustain a career as a freelance director, “you have to develop your own projects and material” or you are at the whim of others, particularly when there are leadership changes at different theatres. She’s not discounting the fact that she might run another theatre of her own in the future. After all, Dominic Cooke is back in the game 13 years after he left the Royal Court, taking over the Almeida from Rupert Goold, who is moving to the Old Vic. 

But for the time being she is revelling in returning to Arcadia, the first major revival of Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece since the playwright’s death in November last year. Stoppard was a supporter of Cracknell and Abrahami when they were at the Gate, turning up to see work, and she was able to have some conversations with him about Arcadia before he died.

“They were gentle conversations, never instructive, as if he were teasing out my way of thinking about the play. I think he was very keen that we would reimagine Arcadia in our own way.” 

She and designer Alex Eales have certainly done just that with an in-the round configuration which gives Stoppard’s most heart-breaking play a more intimate relationship with the audience. 

Not everyone warmed to Tom Stoppard’s plays, some of which were just too clever for their own good and the good of the audience. But his very best plays combine wit and heart in equal measure, and Arcadia is very good indeed. It has got gardening and chaos theory too. Carrie Cracknell’s Old Vic revival transfers to the Duke of York's, offering a partial in-the-round examination of one of the great plays of the 20th century. It’s one that pulsates with ideas but also compassion at our human urge to keep dancing despite tragedy and even as the world grows cold.

Opening this week at the London Palladium, before transferring in the autumn to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, comes Timothy Sheader’s revival of Jesus Christ Superstar. Yes, you may have caught it at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre pre-Covid or at the Barbican, but this is a staging which has real legs, plenty of barnstorming moments, and also subtleties, not least in the way it explores religious and political fanaticism and state expediency. It bears repeated viewings. On this outing Sam Ryder plays Jesus, Tyrone Huntley is Judas, and you can take your pick of Herods with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Richard Armitage, Boy George, Layton Williams and Julian Clary all popping by on various dates during the run.