Particle Physics and Particular Persons: the Join Between Happenstance and Goodness in Hapgood

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.