Anthony Burgess used to write entire novels to make space for one joke, as in The End of the World News, with its ambiguous emphasis. Did Tom Stoppard, I wonder, start Arcadia from a similar conceit — the apple, perhaps? Uniting the most famous untrue story about Newton with the most famous untrue story about Adam and Eve, it’s the almost too clever McGuffin for his pastoral comedy about free will and the heat death of the universe.

The action takes place in the drawing room of an English country house in 1809 and 1989. In 1809, the daughter of the house, precocious 16-year-old Thomasina Coverly (played with winning geekiness by Jessie Cave), is inventing fractals and intuiting the second law of thermodynamics, while her tutor, Septimus (the charismatic Dan Stevens), is one step ahead of his love life catching up with him. In 1989, Hannah Jarvis (a spryly astringent Samantha Bond) is researching the hermit who was said to live in the park, while Valentine Coverly (Ed Stoppard) is trying to map the mathematics of the grouse population through the house’s game books. Bernard Nightingale (Neil Pearson) is a spivvy academic set on proving Byron fought and won a duel there. Bernard has caught the eye of Valentine’s younger sister, Chloe (Lucy Griffiths, wriggling distractingly).

Hildegard Bechtler’s set is a model of lovely simplicity: a big table, tall windows, light streaming in from the imaginary garden outside. Surviving objects link the two eras: books, the table, the Coverly family’s aristocratic hauteur... and Lightning the tortoise, who is able to take the long view. What is the play about? Well, there’s the difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian accounts of the universe, CP Snow’s argument about the two cultures, the tension between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, the philosophy of science, non-Euclidean geometry and the history of garden design. Also love, death and the meaning of life. It’s ambitious. Its characters are essentially parts in a dumbfoundingly intricate machine for moving large ideas lightly around each other on the hinges of wonderful jokes. There’s so much going on that the play is in perpetual danger of upstaging its cast.

Ed Stoppard’s Valentine, for instance, forced to deliver a great chunk of dialogue about chaos mathematics, struggles to sustain the pretence that he’s speaking to the other person on stage, rather than to the audience. Likewise Pearson — with the sweaty brow and shiny grey suit of an ambitious member of Sussex University’s English faculty — puts the pedal to the floor early and keeps it there. We’re told early on that silent Gus Coverly (Hugh Mitchell) can’t abide shouting, so you wonder how he remains on stage during the scenes when Pearson does nearly nothing but. Pushing up the intensity in order to dramatise things is a slight, though only a slight, weakness of David Leveaux’s pacy and entertaining production.

Arcadia isn’t exactly a chilly play, but it’s one where the ideas are moving, rather than the people. It’s a doleful comedy about time’s arrow, whose consolatory note is, paradoxically, reprise. “You seem quite sentimental over geometry,” Bernard charges Hannah. Arcadia shows you why being sentimental over geometry might not be as silly as it sounds.

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