'Arcadia' star Seamus Dillane on honouring the late playwright Tom Stoppard

The actor leads the Old Vic's first production of Stoppard's 1993 drama through 21 March, and he reflects on his past, present, and future with the writer's work.

Seamus Dillane is a cool customer. When I ask the ascending actor — who has barely left the stage since graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2024 — whether he has any backstage rituals, he shrugs, before confessing “a cigarette and a coffee will usually do it”. With his matted mop of hair and ringed fingers, he looks the part too. But while his answers remain measured and thoughtful, his passion peeps through each time our conversation returns to the great, late playwright Tom Stoppard, whose 1993 play Arcadia is currently playing at The Old Vic Theatre.

“It’s just a joy to be in [Stoppard’s] world. He creates such intelligent, caring, feeling people,” he enthuses. “I think often [he] can be misunderstood for these talking heads, but actually there is so much heart, and so much feeling, and relationship, and connection underneath it all.” Indeed, the playwright’s works are revered but also sometimes feared for the intellectual gymnastics they demonstrate, while challenging the audience to keep up. But Dillane is convinced “that’s the way in. If you can come at it with heart, then the intellectual stuff will slot into [place].”

First performed at the National Theatre in 1993, Arcadia has not been staged at The Old Vic before now — though the theatre has mounted many other Stoppard works. In 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead received its London premiere at the venue, and as recently as 2024, it presented Max Webster’s revival of 1982 hit The Real Thing. In fact, director Carrie Cracknell’s revival marks the first major production to run in London since 2009, and many will be coming to it fresh.

So, what’s it about? Set at a stately home in Derbyshire, between 1809 and present day, the play follows two groups of characters: one looking to the future through grappling with complex, yet-to-be-formalised theories, the other excavating the past by imagining the lives of the earlier group of characters. Dillane’s character Septimus Hodge belongs to the earlier, 19th-century set. He’s an academic tutoring the precocious young student Thomasina Coverly, with whom he later falls in love.

So far, so smooth, but it’s a play that challenges the viewer through its exploration of polar concepts: “He’s raising questions between science and religion, love and sex, chaos and order, romanticism and classicism,” Dillane points out. And, like all Stoppard plays, the audience should “expect to work hard… but that’s no bad thing.”

Impressively for an actor so early in his career, this is not Dillane’s first Stoppard. Last winter, he played Pollard in Blanche McIntyre’s Hampstead Theatre revival of The Invention of Love, which is a musing on the private life of the poet A. E. Housman. “I can’t tell if it’s because of that past experience or because this play feels a little more accessible, [but] it jumped out at me a little faster,” he says of Arcadia. “I think The Invention of Love took me three or four readings to understand the first paragraph,” he laughs.

It was while working at Hampstead that Dillane met the playwright — “a lovely man, really generous” — for the first and last time. The 88-year-old writer passed away during the intervening year, and with the theatre world still in mourning, this Arcadia comes at a pertinent time. “It’s a real shame that we haven’t had the chance to be with him, but he was involved with the preparation of [this production],” he shares, adding that Cracknell has remained in contact with Stoppard’s partner throughout the process. And though Stoppard is no longer here, Dillane points out it’s “an amazing gift to the world that we will forever be able to inhabit his people and his landscapes and his world, it’s such a joy.”

Remarkably for a playwright whose career spanned seven decades, Stoppard never went out of fashion. He wrote consistently between 1960 and 2020, and his best works are continuously being revived. Dillane thanks the popularity of Stoppard himself for the fact his plays don’t rely on celebrity casting to put bums on seats, allowing up-and-coming talent, like himself, to snag roles. “I think Tom is one of the few writers who has that power,” he muses.

But while Dillane is relatively new to the game himself, he comes from a family firmly entrenched in the acting industry. His mother Naomi Wirthner, brother Frank, uncle Richard and, of course, his father Stephen Dillane, are all actors. And with his dad earning a Tony Award for his performance in a 2000 revival of Stoppard’s The Real Thing, the bar is set high for the youngest Dillane.

Still, he’s happy with the direction things are going. “Septimus is a great, great part to get, so at this moment I’m very, very happy.” As for Cracknell’s interpretation, he won’t give much away, but says it makes good use of the play’s two timelines, and insists “we’re not all in period dress with very heightened RP.” When I push for a few more details, he adds that “the soundscape [composed by Stuart Earl] is liminal; it can exist in both worlds”, which sounds intriguing.

Meanwhile, it’s already public knowledge that the production is being staged in-the-round, which Dillane believes “brings another dynamic to it. I think it serves this play really brilliantly, that circular shape — the spiralling — lends itself to the theme in the play, and it invites the audience into the world; we’re in it together, figuring it out together.”

Though he’s rapidly notching up roles on both stage and screen, Dillane thinks it’s too early to make a call on which world he prefers. Unusually, though, he has a direct point of comparison: he played a small part in the 2024 film adaptation of The Outrun (which both his parents also starred in) before playing the larger part of Boy in a stage version of the story, which ran as part of the Edinburgh International Festival that same year. What he’s chuffed about is that his co-star from that project, Isis Hainsworth, is playing Thomasina in Arcadia, allowing the two to work opposite one another again.

Dillane hopes this won’t be his last voyage into Stoppard’s world. I ask which part he’d most like to play, and he pauses, pensively, before throwing a tantalising curveball: “I’d love to play Tom Stoppard.” Frankly, between his similarly ruffled hair and calm, self-assured eloquence, I can see it.

Arcadia is at The Old Vic until 21 March.

Book Arcadia tickets at LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Arcadia (Photos by Manuel Harlan)