NOTHING is quite as it seems in Tom Stoppard's intelligent, witty and thoroughly entertaining Hapgood, now playing at the REP.
Josie Lawrence delivers a spot-on performance as the eponymous spymaster juggling a top-level career with single motherhood - a woman in a male-dominated world, whose maverick approach draws both respect and frustration from those she commands, she is faced with the suspicion that one of her team is a traitor.
What unfolds is a twisting tale of deception and entrapment, in a tense Cold War setting where no-one can be trusted and virtually everybody is double-crossing everyone else.
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That said, it's far funnier than one might expect from a spy thriller, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (and for the woman next to use, some laugh-out-very-loud moments). There's humour in the culture clashes between the old-fashioned but somewhat unorthodox Brits and their by-the-book American colleague, and in Hapgood's bending of the rules to accommodate her young son's needs; while Stoppard is not afraid to send up the spy genre as well as making use of its tried and trusted conventions.
In an excellent cast, John Hodgkinson stands out as Kerner, the Russian scientist and double (triple? quadruple?) agent, providing some of the play's most amusing and most poignant scenes. This cleverly-drawn character may drive his Western counterparts to despair with his misuse of English colloquialisms, but his frequent digressions into complex particle physics - a skilful analogy for espionage - are key to understanding the full story.
First performed in 1988, Hapgood has lost none of its relevance, and while its portrayal of the intelligence services may not be entirely authentic, you get the feeling that the characters and situations may not be too far off the mark.
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