H A P G O O D
by Tom Stoppard
March 8, 1988
Aldwych Theatre
Optional Supplemental/Background Information
The following information gives some contextual information about the play including details about the playwright and the history of the story and the original production. It is intended for you to use as much or as little as interests you and is in no way required for you to be familiar with it in regards to our discussions.
SCOTT’S TAKE
HAPGOOD is one of my favorite plays, but it’s a tricky little bugger and not everyone is as fond of it as I am.
The play has several qualities that I love:
It’s a genre (spy thriller) that you very rarely see on the stage.
The plot is quite tricky and should keep an audience constantly surprised and engaged.
The “dumb show” of the first scene is extremely challenging , but should be an exceptional showpiece.
The play first opened at the Aldwych Theatre in 1988 and was one of the rare Stoppard plays that wasn’t originally produced at either the National Theatre or the RSC. While the play sold out it’s initial 6-month run, it received mixed reviews at best and frustrated patrons and critics more often. The play has seen three major revivals and Stoppard has updated the play all three times. It was most recently revived at the Hampstead Theatre in 2015 to very positive reviews.
One of the challenges of the play is a structure which presents a scene to the audience that is either unclear or confusing and then, in the next scene, has the characters explain what took place in the previous unclear scene. There is usually information that an audience doesn’t learn until the following scene, so characters are behaving in ways in which their need or motivation is unclear and apparently contradictory to previous behavior until after the fact. It can produce a bit of a looping effect which might make it very hard to feel like you’re keeping up with the story. It might be worth trying to read each scene and then go back and re-read the previous scen as you progress through the play in order to give yourself a better chance of keeping up with the plot.
Also, since it’s a play about spies, there are the ongoing questions of who is spying for whom and on whom and with whom. Where do a character’s loyalties lie? With a country? With a person? With both? With neither? And can these loyalties change? It can feel like you need a scorecard to keep up.
Stoppard has also used the story to explore wave/particle theory and quantum mechanics and uses elements of the play (characters, story, blocking) as metaphors for the science.
And as if this weren’t enough, Stoppard uses the spy genre and the physics to explore the nature of duality in humans. Secrets, double lives, and conflicts of interest are at the heart of the play.
Here are some little tidbits of information (taken and edited from his recent biography) that might be helpful when starting to read the play:
Writing a Cold War spy thriller towards the end of the 1980s was timely, though it felt familiar rather than thrillingly new. One of the plays’ current challenges is that because of its context it has dated and should be considered a period piece. Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, the anti-ballistic missile system intended as a defense against Soviet attacks, had been launched in 1983. It involved research, funded by the US Air Force, into the physics of anti-matter. By the early 1990s it had become discredited and was abandoned. This historical moment gave the play a Soviet double agent who is a quantumm physicist researching particle-beam weapons for the Star Wars project, close links between MI5 and the CIA, and a definite trace of Margaret Thatcher in the character of Hapgood. She is the single, powerful, managerial woman in an organisation surrounded by men. It was a bold reversal of thriller conventions to have his key operator not be a George Smiley, but a young, attractive, single woman with a sex life and an illegitimate child.
Hapgood: a dauntingly effective intelligence operator who can seemingly act her way out of any predicament. She also has vulnerabilities and desires. She is involved in different ways with all the men in the play.
Kerner: a Russian scientist who is working as a double agent for both the British and the Soviets and had an affair with Hapgood over a decade ago.
Ridley: a British agent who is young, reckless, and whose loyalty is in question. Hapgood is an object of his desire.
Blair: an older operative who is Hapgood’s boss and who Hapgood is in love with.
Wates: a US CIA agent who is both admiring and disdainful of Hapgood’s actions.
From the start we’re in a world which seems highly organized but is also extremely confusing. Double and triple agents are passing secrets of scientific research about Star Wars to the KGB. And an MI5-style British counter-intelligence unit has a mole in it. Almost everyone is under suspicion, and a sequence of scams and staged encounters is set up to reveal the traitor. The play begins n a London swimming pool with a rapid, balletic mime accompanied (in the first productino) by Bach’s Suite in G Minor. There are four cubicles, a shower, and a CIA agent on watch. Russian and British agents, Kerner and Ridley, come rapidly and bewilderingly in and out, swapping towls and briefcases, going to the pool and returning. How many of them are there? Who is tracking whom? It is like a pastiche of a spy movie. It is also meant to represent the movement of electrons. But the audience cannot possibly know this. Stoppard said of the opening: “as in other plays I’ve written, the first scene is supposed to be virtually incomprehensible . . . for ten minutes, it’s just sort of “Hallzapoppin”. That’s sort of a mannerism of mine. Then you clear it up and begin to explain it.”
MEDIA (Illustration): Possible groundplan of Scene 1 for reference.
MEDIA (Audio): BBC Radio Interview with Stoppard on original production of HAPGOOD.
MEDIA: Particle/Waves and the Double Slit Experiment.
MEDIA (Video): The Puzzle of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg explained. OR what happens when Doc Brown from Back To The Future is locked in his house for two years during a global pandemic.
GLOSSARY
P.O.B. - Post Office Box? Not really certain about this.
Bleep - Tracking device.
Joe - The term for an agent out in the field who is being operated by British/American intelligence agencies. The joe is not always a citizen/worker of the opposition.
Control - Agent in charge.
Rugger pitch - Rugby field.
SDI - Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars).
Try - A way of scoring points in rugby.
Pink paper - ???
Democritus - Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe.
Blind - Blind side or open side of the rugby field.
Gumboot - Galosh(es)
Epi - slang for epileptic fit.
Honeytrap - A situation in which someone is tricked into immoral or illegal sexual behavior so that their behaviour can be exposed.
Lillywhite’s - Sporting goods retailer in Picadilly Circus.
Fortnum’s - (Fortnum and Mason) Upscale department store in Picadilly Circus.
A30 - major highway running WSW out of London.
Staines - Town southwest of Heathrow.
Leonhard Euler - see Seven Bridges of Kongsberg video above.
Immanuel Kant - German philosopher who “argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.”
Safe house - a place where one may engage in secret activities or take refuge.
Sleeper - “a spy who is placed in a target country or organization not to undertake an immediate mission but to act as a potential asset if activated. Even if unactivated, the "sleeper agent" is still an asset and is still playing an active role in sedition, espionage or possibly treason[a] by virtue of agreeing to act if activated.”
Cover - a false name or identity.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - The position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory.
Bohr’s atom model -
Milaya moya - My sweet or my dear.
Rodnaya moya - Same as above.
Livermore Research Laboratory - US Government lab focused on weaponized nuclear power.
Grosvenor Square - location of American Embassy
Ab origine - Source or original.
Whitehall secretariat - Offices of the Prime Minister’s cabinet; highest ranking member of the Cabinet.
Niels Bohr - Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory.
Budapest in ‘56, Prague in ‘68, Poland in ‘81 - Uprisings against the Soviet government.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THEATRE
1964: A Walk on the Water
1965: The Gamblers - based on the novel The Gambler by Dostoevsky
1966: Tango - adapted from Sławomir Mrożek's play and Nicholas Bethell translation, premiered at the Aldwych Theatre
1966: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
1968: Enter a Free Man.
1968: The Real Inspector Hound
1969: Albert's Bridge
1969: If You're Glad I'll Be Frank
1970: After Magritte
1971: Dogg's Our Pet
1972: Jumpers
1972: Artist Descending a Staircase
1974: Travesties
1976: Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land
1976: 15-Minute Hamlet
1977: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
1978: Night and Day
1979: Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth
1979: Undiscovered Country – an adaptation of Das Weite Land by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler
1981: On the Razzle based on Einen Jux will er sich machen by Johann Nestroy
1982: The Real Thing
1983: English libretto for The Love for Three Oranges.
1984: Rough Crossing based on Play at the Castle by Ferenc Molnár
1986: Dalliance - an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei
1987: Largo Desolato, translation of a play by Václav Havel
1988: Hapgood
1993: Arcadia
1995: Indian Ink – based on Stoppard's radio play In the Native State
1997: The Invention of Love
1997: The Seagull – translation of the play by Anton Chekhov
2002: The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy of plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage
2004: Enrico IV (Henry IV) – translation of the Italian play by Luigi Pirandello
2006: Rock 'n' Roll
2010: The Laws of War – contributor to a collaborative piece for a one-night benefit performance in support of Human Rights Watch.
2015: The Hard Problem
2020: Leopoldstadt