Isis Hainsworth as Thomasina
Arcadia
Old Vic Theatre, London
January 2026
Photo by Manuel Harlan
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Published 24th August
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
Arcadia premiered at the National Theatre in London in 1993 to great acclaim, followed by revivals in the West End and the Lincoln Centre in New York in 1994, winning the Olivier, Evening Standard and New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards. As we record this episode a wonderful new production is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year.
I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell. I am thrilled to be able to meet Carrie because she is responsible for directing several of the most memorable theatre productions I have ever seen, including her renditions of Medea and The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre, which were both graced by stunning performances by Helen McCrory, and which inspired this podcast’s episodes on those plays.
Carrie Cracknell
Carrie Cracknell is one of the finest directors at work in Britain today. Her production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia opened at the Old Vic Theatre in London in January 2026, and transferred with a slightly altered cast to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End in June 2026.
Her wonderful productions of Medea and The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre inspired our episodes on those two plays. Her other directing credits include the Grapes of Wrath, Julie and Blurred Lines at the National Theatre, Portia Coughlin and Oil at the Almeida, Macbeth and A Doll’s House at the Young Vic, and Birdland with Andrew Scott at the Royal Court.
She has also directed opera at the English National Opera and the Met in New York, as well as a feature film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Her most recent outing was a typically clear-sighted and moving production of Fran Kranz’s unflinching look at restorative justice, Mass, at the Donmar Warehouse.
Carrie recommended Care by Alexander Zeldin.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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