Hapgood review, Hampstead Theatre

Hapgood is a very clever play. It's about spying and it's about particle physics and the way light works, and how two pinpricks of light which are made up of particles will, if close together, start to appear as waves. This is the basis of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which is about particles and waves and the impossibility of capturing the behaviour of electrons, but which people often reduce to this: anyone entering a space, whether it's a bus or a sauna, immediately changes everything about that space and therefore cannot make any useful scientific deductions about it.

From this cod-scientific version one sort-of-gets why Tom Stoppard uses physics (properly) to explain the position of Hapgood, a woman master spy preceding Stella Remington and Elizabeth Manning Buller. Hapgood is off-the-scale brilliant and changes the weather every time she enters a room full of male subordinates. Nothing is as it seems around her, which should be pretty exciting because when we enter Hapgood's world she's trying to discover the identity of a double agent who may be one of twins (which I think in physics terms, is a manifestation of entanglement). Is it the brilliant Russian physicist she turned into a 'Joe', the sexy and risk-taking Ridley with whom there's a continuous frisson, or the text-book Civil Service mandarin, Blair? In Howard Davies' strangely laid back production it almost doesn't matter.

Before the show, as I sat on the concrete benches outside Hampstead Theatre, eating street stall noodles from a brown box, I watched Stoppard, now in his seventies and still brilliant and powerfully handsome, wander into the street and stand under a lamppost where he seemed to be taking stock of things until accosted by a fair haired woman who bounded out to him from the foyer, and I remembered seeing Hapgood when it first aired with Felicity Kendall as Hapgood, sitting on a grey concrete bench not unlike the one on which my bottom was slowly getting colder. Is that really the life of a woman spy, or any spy for that matter, and does it lead to piles? That doesn't really matter either does it?

In conclusion: Hapgood is educational as well as entertaining. I bought the text so I could savour the science and the way it's used to create seriously clever drama. Whether this production does it justice, however, is questionable. Lisa Dillon leads a good cast, but there's no tension. One listens rather than watches. The particles never quite blur into waves.

References
Hapgood, Tickets


Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3.   Run ends January 23.