Hapgood: A Play

by Tom Stoppard

With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that "spins an end-of-the-cold-war tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light" (David Richards, The New York Times ) . It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific discoveries to the Soviets, but as she does so, the web of personal and professional betrayals―doubles and triples and possibly quadruples―continues to multiply.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Physics, Espionage, Mystery Thriller

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so much fun! I am long overdue for a re-read of Arcadia - it's probably been more than 10 years now since I last read it - but I would say Hapgood isn't quite as good, but is in the same vein and comes close.

This short play opens in the men's changing room of a gym, and we quickly get a sense of what kind of tricks Stoppard will be playing on us in Hapgood as multiple people engage in an elaborate process of arriving, putting a briefcase under a changing stall door, moving a towel from one door to another, and then closing themselves into another stall. Some kind of swap is taking place, but there are too many players and too many briefcases, and the reader isn't sure which briefcase has ended up where.

From here we discover that our main characters are British spies during the Cold War. The information being passed along has to do with particle research coming out of CERN in Switzerland, conducted by a Russian scientist who is acting as a double agent. Or is he a triple agent? Something has gone wrong in the changing-room swap, and the spies realize someone in their midst is disloyal. From here, we enter scene after scene that can be read multiple ways: Which spies are playing a role to get another to confess, and which are really speaking the truth? Added to the mix are the Russian scientist's discussions of particle physics, which become an intriguing metaphor for the way the spies interact with each other and the way a double agent must interact with two countries, and even for the nature of truth itself.

It's handy that Hapgood is so short, because my head had been spun around so many times by the end of the first reading that I went right back to page one and read it a second time. It becomes much clearer on a second read and I imagine would benefit from even a third and fourth pass through. If you haven't read Arcadia, start there, but if you loved that one Hapgood is very much worth your time.

[Ms_prue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to re-re-re-read because we saw Atomic Blonde on the weekend and I got all nostalgic for Cold War lady spies.

[Kaethe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even after I'd stopped reading scripts by others, I've continued to read Stoppard. We've got spies,and physics, and guinea pigs and it's all tremendously fun, and so playful with the language. Has anyone had as much fun with words since Wodehouse?

[Paul Secor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think my I might have a higher opinion of this if I had seen it performed. Plays are meant to be seen, not to be read, or at least they're better experienced when seen. That's obvious. Unfortunately, the best I can do right now is to read it.

[Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even Stoppard’s flops are decent

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In a morally ambiguous universe, not even the plot lines are clear." -- imaginary trailer narration

Terrifically clever, emotionally engaging. I'd love to see this staged, but reading it gives a ton of valuable context. Those stage directions! I practically saw the whole thing in my head. I was scared away for a couple months by the complexity of the opening pas de quatre, but once I powered through I was amply rewarded.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Stoppard's other venture into science and love doesn't deliver the emotional KO of Arcadia, this is still a deeply satisfying play--if you can figure out what is going on. After all, this a play about subatomic particles, secret love affairs and a spy caper involving three sets of twins!! It is worth the effort, though.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very intriguing play. Mainly because it is full of it. This is a spy play that takes place during the cold war. Spy plays are not seen that often, and I wish they were. Sometimes it can get a little confusing, but still engaging. The characters are good, but not really great except for, Kerner. This is a light four star rating.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hapgood is a late 1980's A tour-de-force. This play looks at the cold war spy game. Stoppard has fun throwing in the particle/wave problem, the Konigsberg bridge problem, and the use of doppelgangers. Prepare to be confused.

[Daniel Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This play is a fun little experiment with the characteristics of electrons, and subsequently, us. It explores elements of duality in nature-- one of my favorite topics.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of my favorite Stoppard plays, but it might be attributed to the fact that I read it in a state of extreme fatigue and near delirium. Shucks, shucks.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Godsdamnit, I like some emotion in my plays. Even from Stoppard, who can get away with leaving it out.

[Patrick Nichols · Rating 3 out of 5]

I still don't understand what happened in this play.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read before seeing staged reading at ACT. Like most plays, hard to get full picture from own reading - much more fun to see performance. Nice, intricate-if-minor Stoppard.

[Bethany · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting story but there was some confusion with the whole twin-plot thing. I couldn't keep the characters straight.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poor TS. He's repeating himself.

[richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the staging, but guilty of reading too intermittently - needs to be read in one sitting.

[Jeffrey Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good; would be interesting to produce. I hesitate to say this because I'm not nearly enough of a mathematician (or whatever it involves), but Stoppard seems to me to be playing with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, doing as much as he can give us the feeling of watching it work. A cat's life isn't at stake, but he does a lot of sending two characters into an unseen space (and otherwise obscuring them), and making us guess which one of the two we're seeing. Or which came out. Because I've read too many mysteries, the plot and its solution are not particularly compelling to me--or perhaps it's because the characters are not terribly compelling in themselves. What makes the play worth reading is its work with its underlying ideas, and its ability therefore to make us work with them. But maybe I should re-read it.
Most writers have a strength, or two, or three, and you can't ask them to be all the things that literature (and drama) give you as a whole. Thus with Stoppard. I really enjoy him, even when his characters aren't at the level of Shakespeare or Boll.

[Tom O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dizzying and dizzyingly intelligent pastiche of spies and spying, of the stories and lies they tell each other in their search for a devalued truth.

I make no pretence to be smart enough to get either all the jokes or the science but it was pleasure enough to catch what I could and recognise a few more.

Stoppard is often criticised for being more head than heart, letting the clever cleverness get in the way of real emotion. I don't find that to be the case too often and certainly not here. Despite the spy games, the toys and decoys, the danger and emotional risks are acknowledged and keenly felt.

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched this play during my first visit to London the year it came out. I was out of money, it was my last day in town, and, incredibly I found a 20 pound note on the street. The performance was sold out, but, incredibly, a friendly couple sold me a spare ticket. Needless to say, this play is to a great deal about chance. I remember little, but I did try to explain to my neighbors in my lacking English the quantum mechanics that plays an essential role.

[robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saw at a Chicago Storefront theater. The first half was awful. But the second half sang. The reason was the appearance of a great actor who made everything work. If his role had been larger in the first half, he would have made that sing as well.

[Maisie Wrubel · Rating 4 out of 5]

very confusing, but I liked it... I definitely want/need to read it again to better understand it and its nuances and themes, but Arcadia was the same, so that's not a bad thing... I might re-rate it when I read it again

[Rachel Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Arcadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but Hapgood just fell a little flat for me. I'm sure seeing it performed would greatly improve it (that would certainly make the opening scene a lot easier to follow).

[Bob Kaufman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't sure a spy story would work in play form, but it was well done.

[Pranav · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dramatists apology to a mathematician, a trap for particle physicists and Immanuel Kant's first regret, with some nice dialogue thrown in for the joy of it.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

more theoretical physics as theatre from the brain who brought us Arcadia, The Hard Problem and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern

[Amandanoel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars- not my favorite Stoppard by a long shot but still filled with god & science and incredibly intellectual yet poetic and absurd goodness

[Gergely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Physics and spies, what is not to love? Very clever and playful.

[Hanknooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't really remember what the themes of this one were but i really liked his john le carre parody.

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was very confused throughout this play