10 - Science in Hapgood and Arcadia

Summary

even the desperate abstractionist

drives his car of ice into the great question of fire.

Edward Dorn

Stoppard’s two major science-based plays, Hapgood (1988) and Arcadia (1993) have met quite different receptions from audiences and critics. Hapgood, which uses some of the baffling aspects of quantum physics as a parallel to the bluff and double-bluff found in the plots of Cold War spy thrillers, simply confused and irritated much of its audience, while Arcadia, which uses the hardly less confusing mathematical theories of “Chaos” to structure its account of the passage of time in the “timeless” surroundings of an English country house and parkland, is regarded by many as Stoppard’s greatest play. Stoppard is not a playwright who wants to engage only with an élite audience appreciative of an avant-garde aesthetic, so any account of these two plays, even one that makes high claims for Hapgood, must go some way to explain its relative failure. On the other hand, in 1992 Stoppard himself declared that he was interested in it “insofar as it succeeded.” For him, its technical successes were to be the foundation for the critical success of Arcadia.

Clearly, part of the appeal of incorporating scientific theory into theatre is the sheer technical challenge. Quantum mechanics describes the interaction of particles at a subatomic level, where the “common sense” rules of classical mechanics no longer apply. The challenge for the playwright is to find analogies in the larger-scale, human world for the behavior of particles in the subatomic world where our human intuitions completely mislead us. Humans do not, on the face of it, behave like electrons.