When the Peter Wood production of Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood opened at the Aldwych Theatre in London on 8 March 1988 (later performed in New York in 1994), the theatrical world saw the first (and so far the only) staging of particle physics. The play, inspired by Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, intertwines scientific concepts with an austere love story set in an intricately woven Cold War spy thriller. Immediately on release, Hapgood met with considerable criticism for its allegedly stilted and stylised action, some improbabilities of plot, and for its overly complicated, perhaps even irritating, structure. Ever since the award-winning Arcadia came out in 1993, Hapgood has even been dismissed as merely paving the way for this second and much more successful “science play” (see Edwards 2001). On closer scrutiny, however, the espionage story that...
4050 words
Citation: Mader, Doris. "Hapgood". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 July 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16432, accessed 09 June 2026.]
