Isis Hainsworth on mastering Stoppard's 'Arcadia'

As the child prodigy Thomasina Coverly in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Isis Hainsworth is proving she has the brains — and the talent — to shine.

Summary

• Isis Hainsworth reprises her Olivier-nominated role in Arcadia in the West End
• She plays Thomasina Coverly
• Hainsworth stars opposite Seamus Dillane

Characters don’t come much brainier than the teenage prodigy Thomasina Coverly in the late, much-missed Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which is being seen afresh this summer at the Duke of York’s. Age 13 at the play’s start, the adolescent genius is nearly 17 by its heartstopping end and has learned a lot about love to sit alongside knowledge of, among other topics, the laws of entropy and Fermat’s Last Theorem.

The role, says the actress Isis Hainsworth, is “a gift for me,” though audiences in the presence of this 27-year-old’s remarkable performance may feel as if they are the ones in receipt of a gift. An Olivier nominee in April following the February opening at the Old Vic of Carrie Cracknell’s magnificent production, Hainsworth is leading the transfer of Arcadia to the same playhouse where Stoppard’s masterwork was seen in an altogether different production in 2014.

Hainsworth and castmates Seamus Dillane and Angus Cooper are among the current holdovers from the Old Vic cast and are joined for this latest engagement by the likes of Nikki Amuka-Bird and Oliver Chris. The newcomers play rival academics who become enmeshed in the legacy of Thomasina and her tutor - Dillane’s Cambridge-educated Septimus - at the same Derbyshire country estate several centuries before. The time periods conjoin as the play moves towards its devastating close, passion and pain given equal time in a production every bit as fine – in my view – as its 1993 National Theatre premiere which I saw back in the day.

Hainsworth has won acclaim before – as Shakespeare’s Juliet three summers ago at the Almeida, where she met her boyfriend, the actor Jack Riddiford, who is himself soon to appear at the Almeida in a revival of the Sarah Kane play, Cleansed. And she shone as the youngest daughter, Adela, opposite Dame Harriet Walter in the National Theatre revival of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, also in 2023. For the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, she played Isabella last year in a contemporary take on Measure for Measure that by rights is due a West End transfer of its own.

But the opportunity to revisit Thomasina was a no-brainer. “I think I’ve learned so much from playing her that I just wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye,” Hainsworth is saying during an expansive conversation over Zoom, the actress every bit as sparky and animated as the wide-eyed child-woman in her care. “Maybe this is wrong for me to say but I would have found it really hard watching someone else [in the part]. I knew there was more for me to do in the role and to learn, and there were bits that I wanted to work on; it wasn’t done for me yet.”

Some performers might recoil from acting someone half their age, at least at the beginning of the play, but not Hainsworth: “Thomasina matures so much, and those are really formative years from 13 to 17. Especially because of the romance that happens between her and Septimus – spoiler, sorry,” she adds with a laugh, “it’s been a sort of a dance trying to figure out exactly where to place her. I didn’t want to do stereotypical adult-playing-child acting, but I have loved playing a 13-year-old, actually. I’ve ended up finding it so freeing and am having so much fun.”

Hainsworth is also enjoying a character whose skill set is so antithetical to her own. Whereas Thomasina’s restless intellect stuns everyone in her midst, Hainsworth admits to being “dyslexic and dyspraxic and all the ‘dys-es’. Maths in school was my least favourite subject, but here I am as Thomasina speaking fast and confidently and hoping it makes sense.”

Does she find, as performers in Stoppard often do, that this playwright’s maverick mind makes her feel smarter? She smiles: “There are these strange sections of knowledge I have now that I never had before” — the science involved in stirring rice pudding, for instance — “and I suppose that can make you feel cleverer than you were.”

Hainsworth’s entry into the profession is itself unorthodox given that she attended neither drama college nor university. After secondary school, she joined a youth theatre in her native Scotland which then led to a West End gig, age 18, in Lee Hall’s Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, adapted from the novel The Sopranos by Scotsman Alan Warner. That show transferred in 2017 to the same venue, the Duke of York’s, that is now housing Arcadia, the difference being that the auditorium has for this show been configured so as to deliver Stoppard’s play in the round as it was at the Old Vic. “I’ve absolutely loved working this way,” she says of the audience’s presence on all sides. “The merging of the timelines and how everything in the play melds together lend themselves really well to the blocking” – which is to say, you get the emotion of the play, not just its erudition.

Arcadia was the second Stoppard revival, following soon after Indian Ink at north London’s Hampstead Theatre, to open in the immediate wake of the playwright’s death last November, age 88. But as a newcomer to his work, Hainsworth takes pleasure in the fact that Stoppard “watched all our auditions and approved of me: that is so reassuring and such a gorgeous thing to know.” And she is aware of the ennobling effect of Arcadia on the commercial theatre landscape. “This feels like a really rare thing, and the fact that there’s an appetite for Tom and his play is so exciting.”

She admits to apprehension at the Old Vic press night performing before a seasoned Stoppard performer in 2000 Tony winner Stephen Dillane (The Real Thing), whose son, Seamus, is Hainsworth’s scene partner for most of the play. “I did feel quite nervous on press night when Seamus’s dad and mum were in: I really wanted to do them proud, weirdly, and they were so lovely about it and so nice.”

But the recognition she has got for this part, the Olivier nod included, constitutes its own best reward. “I think I’ve never felt so seen by my peers, and it’s nice to feel respected by the people that you respect. I just feel so grateful for this experience.” As do we in the presence of so buoyant and boundless a talent.

Book Arcadia tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

This article first appeared in the July 2026 issue of London Theatre Magazine.

Photo credit: Isis Hainsworth in Arcadia at the Old Vic. (Courtesy of production). Inset: Hainsworth's co-star Seamus Dillane in Arcadia.