At twenty, Tom Stoppard’s classic romp Arcadia still sparkles. Its dazzling explorations of thought, landscape, truth and chaos two hundred years apart in one English country house remain both fresh and savagely funny. A new revival for its anniversary at the Oxford Playhouse, staged by student production company Milk & Two Sugars, captures that energy, and features some virtuoso performances that raise it far above the level of student drama.

The trick with any Arcadia production is in the balance between Stoppard’s spinning, heady ideas – we plunge through the transformations of English landscape gardening, the discovery of entropy, Romantic concepts of self, the validity of humanities study and non-Newtonian laws in dizzying succession – and depth of character. This is commonly regarded as the play where Stoppard succeeded in giving his joyful expositions of concepts a truly human core, and for the most part the cast of the Oxford Playhouse production carry it off merrily.

The callow young academic Bernard Nightingale, set on proving that Lord Byron fought what we come to realise is an entirely imaginary duel, is played as brilliantly and subtly despicable by Ed Barr-Sim. He’s the smugness of the academy come to smarmy life, and invests what can be a very hyperbolic part with just the right amount of misogynistic pomposity. Put him up against Peter Huhne’s lanky Valentine Coverly, the vague grouse-counting scientist, and the result is theatrical fireworks. There was audible audience tension as the two faced each other in Stoppard’s famous, and very funny, argument about the ‘triviality’ of studying who wrote what when. Completing the modern trio, Carla Kingham as the unsentimental and sarcastic academic Hannah Jarvis is at her intense best when angrily immersed in arguing Stoppard’s extensive intellectual points. It’s exhausting work, and when she tired for one brief speech and recited the lines as if by rote, it was evident just how much effort is required to keep Arcadia’s flow buoyant.

The modern players handle their roles with slightly more grace and energy than their counterparts in the early nineteenth century. Tutor Septimus Hodge, as played by David Shields, is a difficult role – juggling brisk but awed conversation with young genius pupil Thomasina (Amelia Sparling), a crush on her aristocrat mother, a sideline as a roué seducing guests’ wives, and envy for his unseen schoolmate Byron’s off-stage success – but Shields handles it deftly. Unfortunately, such is his naturalness that the more formal, blustering performances of Ezra Chater (Nick Williams), Capability Brown-esque landscape architect Noakes (Jonathan Purkiss), Captain Brice (Richard Hill) and the strangely drawling butler (Jo Allan) stand out for their comparative lack of relaxation. Stoppard’s frenzied exchange of quips and back-talk requires confident handling and experience. The real star of the nineteenth-century pieces, unexpectedly, was not the lightly-performed Thomasina – based on Ada Lovelace, Byron’s mathematical genius daughter – but her mother Lady Croom, played with such pointed aristocratic panache by Georgina Hellier that she left half her on-stage compatriots behind.

The dual setting of Arcadia, slipping between modernity and the nineteenth century at the same English country estate, is also handled deftly, thanks partly to the stage design and partly to the choreography – particularly when the time came, in the third act, to meld the two. Much of Stoppard’s dramatic heft in Arcadia is based on the misunderstandings, wilful and otherwise, by the later era of the former, and the handling of these intricate shifts was both dry and well-constructed. Perhaps the staging made a misstep by not sufficiently emphasising Thomasina’s death – it’s mentioned that she dies before her seventeenth birthday by fire, and in many productions she is shown at the end going off-stage with a candle, a haunting presentiment that they chose in this production to abandon. Instead there was a beautiful set piece of pairs dancing across time before the curtain fell. It was a lovely aesthetic choice that nonetheless left the tragedy that would drive Shield’s Septimus Hodge into madness insufficiently felt.

Both the crackle of Stoppard’s wit and the vigour of his journey through diverse aspects of intellectual life, both of the nineteenth century and the twentieth, are clearly felt in the Oxford Playhouse production. Overall, it’s a gripping evening in the hands of stunning ideas and some brilliantly capable talent.

Arcadia runs at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday October 19th 2013.