Word: hapgood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game...
...problem, as always with Stoppard, is plot. Hapgood is either too much a thriller narrative -- replete with an elaborate opening chase sequence that deliberately recalls bedroom farce in its slamming of doors and dropping of trousers -- or not enough of one to offer any real surprises. Stoppard radiates ambivalence about the genre he has chosen. Again, as with Shaffer, redemption comes from the marvelous acting of Felicity Kendal as an intelligence agent painfully aware of her shortcomings as a mother, Nigel Hawthorne as a wise colleague and, above all, Roger Rees as the defector, who is also the secret father...
...also read excerpts from a new play he finished New Year's Day called "Hapgood." The play's main characters are a spy-catcher and a Russian partical physicist who is also a double agent. "Einstein did not believe in a God who threw dice," the Russian says...