A fitting tribute to Tom Stoppard's genius
10 / 10
Alex Eales’s revolving, circular set deftly illustrates the idea that time cannot be unwound, or jam unstirred from rice pudding, and features two glowing ellipses and a host of celestial spheres above. Cracknell’s production is almost seamless and she has assembled probably the finest cast you’ll see on stage this year. Dillane is a saturnine and amused Septimus, while Hainsworth utterly convinces as a prodigy aged 13 and then 17. (The flirtation between the two could be deeply icky in this Epstein-filed era, but manifests as a chaste, and rebuffed, teenage crush.) Puwanarajah is resplendent as the swaggeringly cocksure, grizzle-maned Nightingale, whose opportunistic priapism – also somewhat jarring in a post #MeToo world - mirrors Septimus’s.
