Hapgood: A Play

With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that "spins an end-of-the-cold-war tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light" (David Richards, The New York Times). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific discoveries to the Soviets, but as she does so, the web of personal and professional betrayals--doubles and triples and possibly quadruples--continues to multiply Does light come in waves or particles? Experiment will show either: the experimenter can choose. 'A double agent is like a trick of the light', Kerner the physicist tells Blair the spycatcher. 'You get what you interrogate for.' Dual natures, of light and of people, are the themes of this play. Kerner's secret research is being leaked to Moscow. Is Ridley the double? Or is Kerner a triple? Hapgood is the person to find out, and maybe it will need two of her Hapgood, an extraordinary British secret service officer, is at the center of a web of double and triple agents