Tom Stoppard's 1993 masterpiece covers a startling amount of ground in just over two hours, including, inter alia, Byronic poetry, landscape gardening, carnal embrace, the second law of thermodynamics, chaos theory, determinism vs free will, and Fermat's last theorem. The result of this being that the play made the shortlist for the Royal Institution's 2006 list of ‘best science books ever written'.

Taking place simultaneously in the early-19th and late-20th centuries, the play recounts the events that unfold at Sidely Park, an English country house, and the subsequent efforts of literary historians to piece them together. Septimus Hodge (Wilf Scolding) is tutor to the precocious Thomasina (Dakota Blue Richards), who Stoppard uses to explore various concepts in maths and physics, while the plot revolves around the affairs of Hodge with the older female members of the household, including the wonderfully larger-than-life Lady Croom (Kirsty Besterman). In the present, Bernard Nightingale (Robert Cavanagh) is an academic determined to make his name by implicating Lord Byron in the historical events. He is reluctantly assisted by author Hannah Jarvis (Flora Montgomery), who is researching her own book on the events at Sidely Park. As the play progresses, the lines between past and present begin to blur as the modern historians edge closer to the truth.

This English Touring Theatre production, directed by Blanche McIntyre, does full justice to Stoppard's work, keeping the events fizzing along - no mean feat during some of the technical exposition necessary to explain concepts such as mathematical iteration and thermodynamics. Particular praise therefore goes to Scolding's witty, charming Septimus, and Ed MacArthur as the frustrated mathematician Valentine, a modern-day resident of Sidley Park. In general, though, the strongest performances are from the female characters, with Richards, Besterman and Montgomery bringing Stoppard's characters vividly to life.

If the production had a flaw, it was in the slightly odd acoustics at times, which left some audience members struggling to catch occasional snatches of dialogue in the play's faster sections. Whether this was down to the set design or actors is unclear, but it may simply have been a minor opening-night glitch that can be corrected during the week. Either way, it is not something that should prevent anyone from trying to catch a highly enjoyable performance of what many critics believe to be the best play of the late-20th century.

Student theatre can be a mixed bag, and Arcadia was no different, but that doesn't mean there were no hidden gems in the Milk and Two Sugars production.

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is set in the early 19th century and the very late 20th when it was written. As ever with Stoppard, it is full of witty, intellectual dialogue, many layers of meaning, and commentary on society and the human condition; in this case, heavily combined with academia, and historical and mathematical theory.

A challenging subject for any theatre group, but arguably no more so than the Shakespeare that regularly makes an appearance on student billboards.

I try not to have preconceptions, I do. I was determined to approach this performance of a piece by one of my favourite playwrights with nothing but an open, optimistic mind. I did enjoy it, as did the packed audience, judging from the laughter in most of the right places.

And yet something didn't quite fit. Ever get an itch that's persistent but that you can't locate? It's not overwhelming, but you find yourself idly scratching at an irritant that's so elusive it follows you around for the rest of the day while you explore places trying to find the source the dissatisfaction.

Eventually, I found it - or, rather, recognised it. Buried in the programme, in the director's notes, was this comment: "Arcadia is twenty years old. So, as it happens, am I."

There's the rub. The contemporary scenes in this play were set in 1993 as that was when the play was written and debuted. Yet, for this production team, that is clearly in some dim and ancient past. The atmosphere of the modern scenes was little different from those apparently set in the past, apart from in costume. Whilst there is meant to be similarity and overlap, here it just made the dialogue seem clunky and dated - as though whatever the play had to say was not entirely relevant in today's world, which couldn't be further from the truth. It felt akin to watching children acting the way they think their ancient parents do.

However, don't let that cloud the impression of the performance as a whole. Amelia Sparling and David Shields as two of the main protagonists were a delight to watch. With any student production, there is the roulette-wheel chance of stumbling upon burgeoning stars, and this one was a winner.

Look out for these two - they're something special.

It's hard to know where to begin with Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's time-shifting play about science, art, maths, chaos and love set in an English country house and staged in Christ Church Cathedral Gardens as part of the Oxford University Dramatic Society's summer tour. It is a play full of ideas, yet with a very real human heart. It's an intellectual labyrinth which is fascinating to find your way through, but with characters so winning that discovering their eventual fate is deeply poignant. It seems to be about almost everything.

The sheer density of ideas in the script – from chaos theory to thermodynamics to poetry to landscape gardening – could have made it seem a dry intellectual exercise. But they are delivered so lucidly and arrestingly, and with such personality behind them, that the play never drags. In a play partly about chaos, some glitches can be expected, but the actors are resourceful in dealing with a stiff breeze during the first half and a helicopter deciding to stop just overhead to watch for a while.

While the cast is generally strong, the best performances come from two very different pairs of intellectual sparring partners, one in the early 1800s and one in the present. Teenage mathematical genius Thomasina, just as hungry to live and learn to waltz as she is hungry for knowledge, is played with verve by Charlotte Bayley; as her tutor Septimus (Patrick Netherton) struggles to keep up with and challenge her, the dialogue between them crackles and snaps. In the present we have academic rivals Bernard Nightingale (Owen Findlay) and Hannah Jarvis (Jessica Guise), each pursuing their own agenda in unearthing the house's past.

There's a recurring theme of knowledge lost and consumed by fire, and at first it seems that the present-day scholars – especially Bernard, blinded by his lust for chat show appearances – are doomed to get everything wrong. But we end on a note of optimism that lost knowledge will be rediscovered and truth will ultimately prevail - at least until the inevitable heat-death of the universe.

Arcadia is showing at Christ Church till July 22nd and is well worth catching before the company set off to London and Edinburgh. It's a mental workout, but an exhilarating one that greatly repays the effort.