Out on a major tour for the first time in two decades, Tom Stoppard’s 1993 hit Arcadia is amusing, educational and often a bit baffling for its audiences (this week at Aylesbury Waterside Theatre and from April 13-18 at Oxford Playhouse). This is a show with powerful appeal, especially for A-level students who since 2000 have had the play as part of their syllabus.

Mind you, the co-production by English Touring Theatre and Theatre Royal Brighton is far from faultless. Its director, Blanche McIntyre, is advising its cast to “think big and breathe deeply”, according to a programme note. But a more powerful exhalation of those breaths is required from some of the actors to carry their speeches to the back stalls and balcony.

Every word matters in a drama so packed with ideas and arcane information. Stoppard called the play “a thriller and a romantic tragedy with jokes”. It is also, in part, a science lesson, covering such concepts as iterated algorithms (me neither), chaos theory and fractal geometry. To learn, we must, of course, hear.

The audibility problem arises in part because characters quite often hold forth while looking down at things in front of them — books, drawings, computer keyboards, the tortoise that famously adorns the table at the centre of the action in the two time periods (1809 and 1989) in which the play is set. The proving of Fermat’s Last Theorum in 1994, incidentally — this being another brainy matter much discussed — precludes any revival advancing the second date to the present.

Our focus in the later period at stately Sidley Park is watching a cocky media academic (Robert Cavanah) engaged in literary detective work with some assistance from a pop historian rival (Flora Montgomery) and the maths whizz son of the house (Ed MacArthur).

This alternates with events there in 1809, set against various fashionable pursuits of the time — including the landscaping of ‘Culpability’ Brown, as he is comically renamed here — that will be familiar to readers of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, who is also name-checked in the play.

At their centre is the appealing young tutor Septimus (Wilf Scolding), a Cambridge pal of Byron’s and, like him, one for the ladies. His conquests include the sex-hungry wife of pettish poet Ezra Chater (Nakay Kpaka) and his witty ‘boss’ Lady Croom (Kirsty Besterman), who gets many of the play’s funniest lines. He is able, however, to resist the allure of his precocious teenage charge Thomasina (Dakota Blue Richards), although this is not through lack of trying on her part. To her comes the tragedy which, mercifully, happens out of view.

Arcadia
* Aylesbury Waterside Theatre
Until Saturday
0844 871 7607, atgtickets.com/aylesbury

* Oxford Playhouse, April 13-18
01865 305305, oxfordplayhouse.com