“I feel irrationally, impossibly confident that Arcadia is the finest play written in my lifetime,” wrote the poet Brad Leithauser in a 2013 essay in The New Yorker. Moving the audience back and forth between the 19th century and the present day, Arcadia, written by the incomparable Tom Stoppard, addresses differences between classical and romantic thought, notions of time and truth, and the turbulent nature of love, sex, and jealousy. The Old Vic’s production of Arcadia is directed by Carrie Cracknell, whose recent work includes The Grapes of Wrath at the National Theatre (2024) and Sea Wall/A Life with Jake Gyllenhaal (2019). —Jeanne Malle