Puzzles and Puns: Tom Stoppard’s Plays
How Stoppard uses illusion and wordplay to weave his narratives together
Onstage September 6 through October 14, 2018 at Lantern Theater Company, Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood has mystery coded into its DNA. As a spy story, intrigue abounds and illusions are necessary to keep up the ruse. Though Hapgood is Stoppard’s first and only foray into the world of secret service, it is far from the first time his work has dealt in mystery, puzzles, and plots that are not what they seem to be. A Tom Stoppard play can be counted on to contain multitudes.
Stoppard’s work is never about one thing. His plays have been compared to prisms, Russian nesting dolls, and kaleidoscopes, continuously refracting — or revealing — their themes. Hapgood deals with espionage and quantum physics. The Hard Problem explores neuroscience and hedge funds. And Arcadia — which the Lantern staged in 2014 — delves into chaos theory, Romanticism, thermodynamics, Lord Byron, and English gardens.
Stoppard writes plays based on what is fascinating him at the moment: reading about chaos theory sparked Arcadia, and the physics came before the spies for Hapgood. “I stubbed my toe against two pieces of information or two areas of science which I found really interested me,” Stoppard said in an interview with Mel Gussow for American Theatre magazine. “My life is sectioned off into hot flushes. Pursuits of this or that.”
It sounds heady, but another hallmark of Stoppard’s work is the palpable joy with which he writes these disparate topics, and how delighted he is to share them with his audience. As he told The Independent, “One tries to write the thing one is writing with a kind of envy for the person who’s going to encounter it [for the] first time…When you’re writing you have to be in a state of relish.”
With the disparate influences and the desire to share them comes another element characteristic of Stoppard’s work: puzzles and illusions. In Arcadia, a deep study of a garden’s architecture unearths a mystery: what happened to a terrible poet visiting the home at the turn of the 19th century, and what did Lord Byron have to do with his possible demise? In The Real Thing, Stoppard starts with an illusion: the first scene the audience sees turns out to be from a play within the play. And in Hapgood, illusion and puzzles are the driving force: what happened at the pool, and are the people onstage who they claim to be?
For Stoppard, though, the illusion and the puzzle are starting points, not ends. Hapgood director Peter DeLaurier calls the play a “howdunit” rather than a “whodunit”; the “who” is revealed early, and the puzzle of “how” can only be solved through illusion. But in the crafting and delivery of those illusions, something else is revealed: the parts of the characters they keep hidden from everyone — even themselves — come to the fore. As one character says, they “made up the truth.” For Stoppard, illusion reveals truth, and puzzles lead to clarity, but perhaps not in the way we hope for or expect.
The puzzles Stoppard builds on a plot level are mirrored in his language, as he is celebrated for his wordplay. Punning is a kind of illusion; the punner hides meaning behind wit. And like his illusions and puzzles, Stoppard’s wordplay is functional. In After Magritte, the title is itself a pun: the play takes place after a family sees a Magritte exhibit, but its surrealist structure also takes after Magritte. Early in Hapgood, Stoppard plays on the multiple meanings of “blown” and “blowed”: idiomatically, it means “surprised or amazed,” but also “mess up.” In spy lingo, it means “revealed or unmasked.” Through the puzzle of wordplay, Stoppard’s audience is told that a surprising error has resulted in Kerner’s unmasking:
Blair: You’re blown, Joseph.
Kerner: I love it. You blew it and I’m blown. Well, I’ll be blowed.
In Stoppard’s plays, nothing is as it seems. Scenes are turned inside out, revealing the truth his illusions conceal. Solving one puzzle unmasks another. Hapgood’s espionage professionals deal with double agents, subterfuge, and cover stories; their function is a natural fit for Stoppard’s form.
Hapgood is onstage at the Lantern September 6 through October 14, 2018. Visit our website for tickets and information.
