When she started thinking about her approach to Tom Stoppard’s time-travelling, chaos theory-inspired play Arcadia, director Blanche McIntyre jokes she considered picking up the York Notes.

“I’m not a mathematician,” she says. “The lovely thing is Stoppard makes you feel like you get it – he makes the ideas accessible.

“He doesn’t talk about chaos theory and fractals in the play, instead it’s about rice pudding and what happens to the jam when you stir it. He relates it back to things you know naturally yourself.”

Set in the country house Sidley Park in the early 19th and late 20th centuries, the play tells the story of two modern scholars living in the house, and the subjects of their studies who lived there more than 180 years before.

McIntyre describes the play as creating chaos out of order, as the shifting time changes reveal new angles to the story.

“It’s like a kaleidoscope,” she says. “Every scene gives a little turn and a new picture emerges.

“The present day story feels like a detective story, while the past is like a journey of discovery. The play keeps unfolding itself and revealing something new. I need to make sure the audience is always surprised by what is going on.”

Tonight’s performance launches a national tour of the play by English Touring Theatre and Theatre Royal Brighton Productions.

Arcadia came fourth in a national English Touring Theatre audience poll looking for their favourite play. Taking the top spot from 1,400 nominated plays was Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (which comes to Theatre Royal Brighton on Monday, February 9) with Michael Frayn’s backstage farce Noises Off second and Shakespeare’s Hamlet third.

“There is a pressure from all sides,” says McIntyre, who also directed the Noel Coward short play Tonight At 8.30 which came to Theatre Royal Brighton in July.

“Arcadia is an audience favourite, one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, and all the directors I know have said they would love to direct it. People feel very protective of the play.”

She believes part of this love of Stoppard’s play comes from its warmth.

“The human story is an important part of it,” she says. “It’s so moving – even if the audience start off feeling confused by the jumps in time they should be onside because of the characters, who are so warm and funny.”

Taking one of the lead roles, 19th century student Thomasina, who goes from 13 to 16 in the play, is Brighton’s own Dakota Blue Richards. “It was very tough to audition,” says McIntyre. “Dakota is one of very few people who could have played the girls in both time periods.

“Girls in the 19th century didn’t hit puberty until they were about 16 so the challenge for Dakota is to be somebody with that mindset.”

McIntyre deliberately chose to keep the “present day” section of the play in 1993.

“Stoppard writes about his age transparently,” she says. “The characters talk like people from 1993, they are observed so well.

“It’s very much of the John Major years. The models one of the characters works on to determine the population of grouse in the grounds depends on an algorithm, which seems so old hat now with the internet. We would need whole new lines on maths and the internet, as the way we do that kind of research has changed.

“If we are thinking about a time from our own lifetime it’s harder to step away and be objective about it.”

The walls of the Arcadia rehearsal room are covered in the research McIntyre and the cast have been conducting into the two time periods, chaos theory, architecture and the poetry of Byron which all have a role in the play.

“We have all been pitching in according to our own experiences,” says McIntyre, who has been conducting split rehearsals with the cast.

“The people from the present and the past are kept apart in the play – except for the last scene they are never on stage together.

“They are like a series of planets circling around the sun – they often obscure each other, but they are so separate for most of the time.

“When we start putting it together we will see everybody else’s bits of work, the actors will pick up ideas from the other half of the play.”

As for McIntyre herself once this tour has begun she is planning to move from Stoppard’s Arcadia to Shakespeare’s Arden. The next project the freelance director has on the way is a version of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe.

“It’s a lovely way to spend the spring,” she says. “I suspect some of Arcadia will blend into As You Like It – they have some interesting similarities.”