BASC70025 - Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood and Travesties
Course Description
Tom Stoppard’s 1974 Travesties is widely known; his 1988 Hapgood less so. Travesties is his brilliant, break-neck souffle of literary giant James Joyce, sprightly Dada-ist Tristan Tzara, and the brooding, revolution-brewing Vladimir Lenin’s actual co-incidence in war-avoiding Zurich in 1917. With hot librarians, train stations, swell trousers and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest dialogue and character confusions folded in. It is “narrated” by the (REAL) now-aged minor British Consular official Henry Carr, who had indeed played Algernon (“the other one”) for The English Players’ amateur production of Earnest there at that time. And sued Joyce, as company business manager, over his refusing Carr’s demand to be reimbursed for the lavish period costuming he’d bought himself. Shot heard ‘round the world. (Joyce got in the last salvo painting Carr as a crude redcoat in the Nighttown brothel scene of Ulysses.) Travesties’ best productions leave one breathless with laughing, mind – and EARS – racing to keep up. And, evocatively, also haunted by the decline and poignancy of the significance-longing aging Carr, by the real “mud and blood” of World War I’s horrors, by Life’s claims and costs of art and poetry, capitalism and politics, meaning and nothingness.
Stoppard’s 1988 Hapgood features Elizabeth Hapgood (“Mother”), spymaster presiding over an all-male staff echoing Britain’s M15and, as single mother to her life-involved daughter. The high stakes of constancy and betrayal in life and work (a mole in the agency!) and high physics (quantum theory and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal figure) embroil with the stakes of espionage’s geopolitical consequences and risks. The work may also probe how the consequences, risks and uncertainties within and between human bosoms may be of terrible stakes as well. Intriguingly, The Guardian’s Mark Lawson cites, Hapgood is one of four plays with a female protagonist written in quick succession (Night And Day, Arcadia and Indian Ink being the others between 1978 and 1995). We shall explore what “Mother” Hapgood precipitates and reveals.