In a grand English country house, two centuries converse without knowing it. A brilliant girl in 1809 intuits the second law of thermodynamics over her mathematics lesson while, in the same room in the present day, academics squabble over literary history and get nearly everything wrong. Tom Stoppard's 1993 play braids Romanticism and chaos theory, landscape gardening and Byronic scandal, into a structure as elegant as the equations it discusses. The comedy is precise and the grief arrives almost unnoticed, gathering force until the final scene, when past and present share the stage and two couples waltz simultaneously across two centuries. It is a play about the irreversibility of time and the human refusal to accept it.