When Tom Stoppard closes one door, he opens another. Then he goes back to the original door and reopens that, then he opens a third door… and pretty soon, as a sequence of potential spies carrying briefcases and towels enter and re-enter swimming pool cubicles, we are hilariously, elegantly and completely foxed. Who is who? What the Stoppard is going on? Hapgood begins, in director Howard Davies’s brilliant hands, as a hectic farce. And it continues to tease. At the end of the evening, the woman sitting next to me protested: “I am none the wiser!” And that has, since 1988, been the dominant reaction to Stoppard’s least-performed play, in which cold war espionage, particle physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle collide.
Hapgood, Stoppard has said, is his only play to involve “plot”. This revival is the third or fourth rewrite of the original, involving enough identical twins/double agents to qualify for a Shakespearean comedy. Doubling – and some doubling up with laughter – is the key to the evening. A fantastic cast performs the play with a zestful clarity that gives you confidence that they, at least, are not missing a trick, But blink and you’ve missed it: observation is all. A double agent is a “trick of the light”. As Hapgood, also known as “Mother” and head of a British intelligence network, Lisa Dillon is poised, pert, first-rate in her killer heels. But she also exactly conveys the vulnerability of the control freak. She is a single mother (her son the progeny of Kerner, a Russian physicist in her employ whom she now suspects of being a mole) and we see her cheering frantically for their child at rugby matches (he only made the second team). Tim McMullan is outstanding as her boss, Blair: glossy, laconic and slightly menacing. And Alec Newman’s Kerner is wonderful too – dynamic and intellectually restless, even if his lessons on the wave and particle nature of light feel grafted, more ornament than necessity.
And speaking of ornament, Ashley-Martin-Davis’s set is admirably unfussy. But it is Ian William Galloway’s astonishing video work that bowled me over. On multiple screens of oriental elegance, Galloway conjures everything from a swimming pool (the deep end, naturally) to a majestic lion, chalked equations, a school rugby pitch, a hotel at night. His effects are beautiful to behold. If you like intellectually riddling theatre, you won’t see a better production of Hapgood than this.
