Arcadia - Bristol Old Vic

Tom Stoppard's plays are very clever. But the true delight for their target audience is that rather than merely serving as a vainglorious monument to the playwright's intellectual prowess, its actually the audience member on whom they reflect well. Arcadia offers middle-class punters the opportunity to nod knowingly - and discourses loudly afterwards - on such diverse topics as chaos theory, iterative algorithms, the death of the Age of Reason on the rocks of Romanticism, the rank hypocrisy of mediocre English academics in the late 20th century, the impact of the Gothic novel on the formal landscape garden, and a flurry of other subjects to vigorously engage even the most active mind. Like a Melvyn Bragg radio programme or the non-fiction shelves at Waterstone's, Stoppard's work enables those who spend their time far from intellectual pursuits to feel that their brain is not a wasted and atrophied organ after all; they are still au fait with what really matters in the groves of academe.

This is a play of ideas: a chance to virtually acquire joint honours in Mathematics and English in the course of a single evening, and all for the price of a theatre ticket. The problem is that the ideas are so thick on the ground that they tend to drown out the people. The author becomes so enraptured in the intricate ingenuity and erudition of it all that he allows the characters gradually to shrink to the role of ciphers, like Ayckbourn with the soul taken out and intellectual hundreds and thousands sprinkled in its place. What is left is a production which runs with the smooth precision of a Swiss watch - and is about a spiritually enriching. It may do a lot for your mind, but Arcadia does absolutely nothing for the heart. Smart - but soulless.