Abstract
In a wonderfully evocative opening, Hapgood begins with a red dot moving about a map of London projected onto panels which fill the stage1 while we eavesdrop — by means of a voiceover — on British espionage agents who have a blue Peugeot under surveillance as it traverses a Byzantine labyrinth of London streets. Stoppard, who used screens to dazzlingly theatrical effect in Jumpers by filling the stage with the projection ‘in very big close-up’ of Dotty’s ‘dermatograph’,2 expands the map of London before our eyes in ever-increasing close-up. As the supersleuths home in on their human prey with deadly accuracy, we can see not only major thoroughfares but side streets, tiny lanes, and finally the outlines and floor plans of individual buildings. Thus, in one dazzling stroke, Hapgood combines spy technology with stage wizardry to transform the entire audience into espionage agents following an electronic bleep. By the time the first person comes through the doors of the bathhouse which forms the set for the first scene we know that agents have been following him all around London. Or at least we think they have been following him all around London. Amid the multiple wordless exits and entrances of that first scene the audience may or may not catch on to the fact that the first person through the door, identified only as ‘the Russian’, has an identical twin who also enters and exits during the course of that scene.
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Notes
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (London: Faber and Faber, 1972 text), p. 82.
Tom Stoppard, Hapgood. Copyright © 1988 by Tom Stoppard. (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 73; hereafter noted parenthetically in my text.
David Gollob and David Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’, Gambit, 10, no. 37 (Summer 1981), p. 16.
Clive James, ‘Count Zero Splits the Infinite’, Encounter, 45 (November 1975), pp. 68–76.
Tom Stoppard, ‘Some Quotes and Correspondence’, Hapgood theatre programme, London: Aldwych Theatre, March 1988, p. [11].
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 2nd ed. (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 20.
Mel Gussow, ‘Jumpers Author is Verbal Gymnast’, New York Times, 23 April 1974, p. 36.
Mel Gussow, ‘Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly’, New; York Times, 26 April 1972, p. 54.
Michael Billington, ‘Tricks of the Light’, Guardian, 9 March 1988, p. 17.
Michael Billington, ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’, Guardian, 18 March 1988, p. 28.
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 92.
Professor Leonardo Castillejo as quoted by Adam Edwards, ‘Criticism Takes a Quantum Leap’, Mail on Sunday, 20 March 1988, p. 16.
Tom Stoppard, Professional Foul (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 55.
Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, 2nd rev. ed. (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 63.
William A. Henry III, ‘London’s Dry Season’, Time, 132 (18 July 1988), p. 73.
Tom Stoppard, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 29.
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© 1990 Paul Delaney
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Delaney, P. (1990). Particle Physics and Particular Persons: the Join Between Happenstance and Goodness in Hapgood. In: Tom Stoppard. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20603-2_7
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