This play has something for everyone. For all you scientists, chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics are all there. I'm sorry, that part in the first act left me wanting to walk out. But wait. I have to agree with one critic who said the " production is at its best in showing how we misread the past". So as someone whose searches into family history knows, records of the past can easily trip you up. Their interpretation can lead you down the wrong path.
What was brilliant about this play was we know exactly what happened at Sidley Hall in 1809 and 1812. These early scenes seem pretty ordinary and quaint (it is the nineteenth century) but little do we know how important is their relevance to what comes next. When we flash forward to the present day, the scholarly visitors to Sidley are searching the Coverly family archives for their next big revelation about two people. Bernard Nightingale is on the track of Lord Byron who may or may not have been involved in a tragedy, whilst Hannah Jarvis is trying to find the identity of the hermit whose hermiage was built around that earlier time. Robert Cavanah and Flora Montgomery spar superbly in these roles.
So when we see Nightingale drawing the wrong conclusions, having seen what actually happened, the play just gets better and better. So an uneven first half ( some of the dialogue is so fast, it takes a lot of concentration) is followed by a truly brilliant second. Even the part about iterated algorithms I could just about handle if not understand. The director, Blanche McIntyre, has taken on an intellectually complex play and made a great stab at making most of it dramatic and funny. Not really an emotional evening, and the maths was beyond me. But the dialogue is very clever, especially the sparkling wit that Tom Stoppard gives all his characters.
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