Like much of Stoppard, Hapgood can be baffling at times, but nothing is really quite so puzzling as the fact that it bombed when it was first produced back in 1988. I saw it with Kate Burton at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and liked it immensely, so I was interested in seeing it again. It’s a spy story set during the cold war, interspersed—of course!—with lectures on particle physics. It’s not perfect Stoppard, but it’s good enough Stoppard, and that makes it sufficient pleasure for me.
The opening scene, a briefcase drop at a swimming pool locker room, is a giddy parody of a surveillance operation. The complex and iterative timing of the scene is the play’s first puzzle, and it’s very funny, even when we don’t know (and who could possibly know?) that the secret agents who enter the locker room are replicating the mathematical problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsburg.
We had the benefit of a talkback with actors following the production, and most audience members focused on the difficulties of following the text, until Lisa Dillon (Hapgood) finally responded with her hope that the audience also felt “the beating heart” within it as well. Finding this balance of heart and mind is, of course, the usual problem with Stoppard, and only Arcadia has got it just right.
But Hapgood does it well enough, I think. In an intrigue drenched in ambiguous motives and actions, with background discussions of uncertainty and duality in particle physics, the spymaster Elizabeth Hapgood seems to be the one person certain of what she is doing and who everyone is. Until the poignant moment at the end when she learns that she was misled about the role of her young son in the complex sting that finally catches the double agent. He appears precisely where she thought he wasn’t. The traditional logic in which she excels proves not quite adequate, and we are thrown back to contemplating the scientist Kerner’s quantum paradoxes.
And what pleasure there is in hearing Kerner ridicule textbook diagrams of atoms, picturing instead an atom’s nucleus as the size of one’s fist in St. Paul’s Cathedral, with its electrons flitting about its capacious interior like moths. Or, as a sleeper agent (double? triple?) himself, speculating that we may all be double in nature:
So it is with us, we’re not so one-or-the-other. The one who puts on the clothes in the morning is the working majority, but at night—perhaps in the moment before consciousness—we meet our sleeper—the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the bourgeoisie, the captain of industry admits the justice of common ownership.
All this—bristling intellect, crisp action, the rare emotional vulnerability—was expertly worked out by the Hampstead cast, who had the benefit of Stoppard coming by to consult with them. And I left happy, prepared to confront my own sleeper on the edge of this morning’s consciousness.
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