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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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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
2,585 Words |
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
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
... (1997 of 15140 Characters)
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