Reviews for Hapgood

The average rating for Hapgood based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-22 00:00:00 ROBERTO JACOBO 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-08 00:00:00 John Regier 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?