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Tom Stoppard Crosses Nuclear Physics With Espionage: Yet Another Hit From the West's Most Important Playwright |
| Section: THE ARTS / THEATER |
| Author: Herb Greer |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1988 |
| Size: 2,585 Words, 15,140 Characters |
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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 crit...
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...nce. Not only is most of his work great fun; he has the advantage--extremely rare in this profession--of not being a political imbecile. If his new play is not up to his top form, it still has enough flashes of wit and high spirits to make it more than bearable. I would far rather sit through it than suffer most of the evenings provided by the majority of his so-called serious contemporaries.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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