Get Out More...................................Theatre Review

HAPGOOD (Birmingham Rep)

17-04-2008

Is it The Spy who Loved me…? Nope, it’s Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, a cold war spy thriller with a difference, currently playing at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. If you like a conundrum to solve with a bit of philosophising on the side, this is the play for you reckons Paula Elenor - albeit with some reservations.

The Rep’s Artistic Director, Rachel Kavanaugh, has directed this show herself and a slick job she has made of it too.

The play is intricately wrought, and it has been staged to intensify its contrasting moods and to make sense of its twists and turns, bluffs and double-bluffs. Witty visual gags parody the genre; it doesn't take itself too seriously.

However, the more serious undercurrents about conflicting loyalties and betrayal – the very stuff of the genre – are played out in more sombre ways. Darkness threatens to encroach on the characters in moment of self-doubt and crisis in more ways than one.

Hapgood as a character provides plenty of opportunities for the comic talents of Josie Lawrence. A kind of precursor of Judy Dench’s M – the character presides in a man’s world of espionage and counter-espionage, playing long-distance chess with a colleague in Canada (without a board), “being mother” to her team of attendants as she pours their tea, and doing her very best to be a “good mother” to her young son at prep school.

Hapgood is a 1980s “thinking man’s crumpet” - clever, attractive, maternal, playful and maybe a tad eccentric – a great role for Lawrence. I wasn’t surprised to read in the programme notes that Stoppard originally penned the play for Felicity Kendall – his then partner.

There is a darker under-belly to this play and Josie Lawrence handles these scenes well: the effects of constant suspicion, nerve-racking tension and occasional glimpses of vulnerability are all suggested in her performance.

Hapgood is surrounded by a coterie of male attendants, and I enjoyed the performance the male leads enormously. The verbal and intellectual brilliance of scientist Kerner, Hapgood’s “Joe”, is contrasted with the urbane caution and incisiveness of the quintessentially British Paul Blair .John Hodgkinson and Christopher Ettridge respectively give solid performances as the emotional and intellectual pillars of Hapgood’s world.

To sum up, I enjoyed the production – the staging and performances – but not the play itself, which I found rather boring and pretentious – particularly in the second half. I am afraid that for me, it never really went beyond being a vehicle for Felicity Kendall.

Seeing it performed twenty years later, no amount of Stoppardian irony and word play can make it seem anything other than a dated, stereotypical cold war spy story for the educated middle –classes.

No amount of self-justification by Stoppard, who professed to be working his material in a different, more intellectual way than John Le Carre, can alter the fact that he is recycling the same old tired class, gender and national stereotypes of the genre.

Frankly, Le Carre is better than this – his world of the British secret service is more subtle and clever than anything Stoppard has to offer in this play, at least.

So, the Rep has done a good job with second-rate material. It went down well with Tuesday’s audience though – my reservations cannot detract from its audience appeal.

Hapgood runs at Birmingham Rep until April 26. Tickets from www.birmingham-rep.co.uk