Review: Hapgood, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until May 24

2:11pm Thursday 15th May 2008

IT is surprising how rarely Tom Stoppard's plays spin their complex webs across our northern stages.

A search of The Press's library files of the past ten years reveals a couple of amateur bashes at The Real Inspector Hound and a West Yorkshire Playhouse production of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead in Ian Brown's debut season as artistic director in October 2002.

This near-drought is all the more puzzling, given Sir Tom's status as a Pocklington School old boy and, more importantly, his continuing potency as a deep-thinking, philosophical writer with wit and wordplay to boot.

This is reason in itself to investigate the Playhouse and Birmingham Repertory Company's co-production of Hapgood, Stoppard's 1988 exercise in physics and espionage, although Ian Brown's programme note that "the play explains Quantum Physics in a way even I can begin to grasp" is not the sexiest sales pitch ever.

And there's the rub. Stoppard makes you work hard, concentrate like Geoffrey Boycott batting for his century, even testing the boundaries of boredom, not unlike Sir Geoffrey, in long expositional passages.

Granted, any play that combines Einstein, God and "the solution to the anti-particle trap" is challenging, but hold on to your seat and your mortar board.

Yes, the physics may lose you - and congratulations on your degree success if it doesn't - but Hapgood is also a sophisticated, labyrinthine spy thriller that adroitly lampoons spy thriller clichés, while negotiating almost as many twists and turns as a Bramham Park horse trial.

Stoppard also has a turbulent love story bubbling to the melodramatic boil across the old Cold War divide, and he shares Shakespeare's mischief-making relish for twins, one of comedy's stock devices, and most useful in a thriller too.

Without giving too much away, it means there is more to enjoy in the central performance by Josie Lawrence in Rachel Kavanaugh's ever-teasing production.

Lawrence's comic skills have their moment in an otherwise straight-laced performance as stern, troubled spymaster Mrs Hapgood, opposite Christopher Ettridge's Blair, a master of obfuscation in the manner of Yes, Minister's mandarins.

No doubt nine out of ten will prefer a Prime Suspect yarn, but Hapgood still states the case for more Stoppard plays on Yorkshire soil.

Box office: 0113 213 7700.

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