By Mark Shenton
20 Apr 2009

Tom Stoppard
photo by Aubrey Reuben

Complete casting has been announced for the new production of Tom Stoppard's Aradia that begins performances at the West End's Duke of York's Theatre May 27, prior to an official opening June 4 for a run that is currently booking to Sept. 12.

Trevor Cooper (who will play Richard Noakes), Sam Cox (Jellaby), Lucy Griffiths (Chloe Coverly), Tom Hodgkins (Captain Brice), Hugh Mitchell (Augustus/Gus Coverly) and George Potts (Ezra Chater) join the previously announced Ed Stopard (Valentine Coverly), Samantha Bond (Hannah Jarvis), Nancy Carroll (Lady Croom), Jessie Cave (Thomasina Coverly), Neil Pearson (Bernard Nightingale) and Dan Stevens (Septimus Hodge).

Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia premiered at the National's Lyttelton Theatre in 1993 before transferring to the West End's Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and was subsequently presented at Broadway's Vivian Beaumont Theater under the auspices of Lincoln Center Theater in 1995. Both the original West End and Broadway stands were directed by Trevor Nunn, and the play won both the Laurence Olivier Award and New York Drama Critics' Best New Play Award. This new production, being produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Roger Berlind and Robert G. Bartner, is directed by David Leveaux, and features set designs by Hildegard Bechtler, costumes by Amy Roberts, lighting by Paul Andersona and sound by Simon Baker.

In publicity materials, the play is described as "a dazzling, witty masterpiece of misunderstanding and quest for knowledge, resonating across centuries." The play is set in two time periods: in April 1809, at a stately home in Derbyshire, a gifted pupil called Thomasina proposes a startling theory, beyond her comprehension. All around her, the adults, including her tutor Septimus, are preoccupied with secret desires, illicit passions and professional rivalries. Two hundred years later, academic adversaries Hannah and Bernard are piecing together puzzling clues, curiously recalling those events of 1809, in their quest for an increasingly elusive truth.

Leveaux has previously directed revivals of Stoppard's The Real Thing at the Donmar Warehouse in 1999 (a production that subsequently transferred to the West End's Albery Theatre in 2000 and then to Broadway's Barrymore Theatre that year) and Jumpers at the National's Lyttelton Theatre in 2003 (a production that subsequently transferred to the West End's Piccadilly Theatre later that year, and then to Broadway's Brooks Atkinson in 2004). His other Broadway directorial credits include transfers of his London stagings of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1984 and Electra (first seen at the Donmar Warehouse) in 1998, as well as new productions for Broadway of Anna Christie in 1993, Betrayal in 2000, Nine in 2003, Fiddler on the Roof in 2004, The Glass Menagerie in 2005 and Cyrano de Bergerac in 2007.

To book tickets contact the box office at 0870 060 6623 or visit www.arcadiatheplay.com.