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Tom Stoppard Crosses Nuclear Physics With Espionage: Yet Another Hit From the West's Most Important Playwright
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14363 |
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THE ARTS
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6 / 1988 |
2,585 Words |
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Herb Greer
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Cheekiness is a virtue for the good playwright, and Tom Stoppard has a generous supply of it. At various times he has laced his dramaturgy with probability theory, linguistic philosophy, geometry, the inspired nonsense of the Belgian painter René Magritte, and the ambiguities of sanity-versus-insanity for dissenters in a totalitarian society. His last play, The Real Thing, lowered that intellectual tone a little, with some very sub-Pirandellian dodging between what is theatrical and what is (perhaps) real. Most of the time, however, Stoppard has conjured well with "serious" academic jargon, juggling it delightfully with his verbal glitz and offhand punning. Combined with wonderful luck in the matter of actors and directors, these things have made amusing light evenings out of very, very unpromising material.
For his new play the luck has slipped a little. Hapgood, which opened at the Aldwych in March, attempts a sleight-of-theater coup with notional parallels between the enigmas of sub-nuclear physics and the mysteries of espionage. These are not central to the story but scattered through it in chunks of flashily paraphrased textbook verbiage. Stoppard calls up spirits from the vasty depths of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the cloud of electrons around the atomic nucleus. They are meant to decorate the play, but some of them stay on stage too long and haunt it.
Narrative Simplicity
These ingredients seem to have dazzled a number of London critics, one of whom began his review by calling the play "a spy thriller of a complexity that reduces Len Deighton and John LeCarre to the narrative simplicity of Little Red Riding Hood." The author of this awesome praise (Irving Wardle of the Times) then changed his mind and decided that Stoppard had written a sentimental tract in which a lady counterspy discovered the true joys of motherhood. Wardle's confusion led him to attribute the incidental music to Bach; actually it is Vivaldi, supplemented by the bass solo from a jazz classic, "Big Noise from Winnetka," and the popular standard "Tenderly." The Daily Telegraph critic made no comment on the music but said huffily that he did not understand the play; the man from the Independent shrugged it off as boring, while poor Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer (who also thought the music was Bach) grumbled that Stoppard had "left his homework lying around onstage." John Peter of the Sunday Times was pleased with it; he mentioned "the life-enhancing proposition called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle" (I confess to have no idea what he meant by that) and burbled that the play's "intellectual excitement" kept him on the edge of his seat. From all this, one might gather an impression of a deadly serious playwright, earnestly trying to impart something deeply significant to a mixed and masochistic audience, such as to be found at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.
It is possible that Stoppard is a serious writer. At least his plays make plenty of money, and that is always a serious matter. But the Aldwych has long since ceased to be the quasi-shrine that it was when the Royal Shakespeare Company was there. It is now a West End theater. And with the best will in the world, Hapgood is not a serious, and certainly not an earnest, play. It is actually light, elegant West End tosh.
The story is nothing more complicated than that old standby of spy fiction, a mole hunt in the ranks of British
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