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Hapgood

 ((Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, New York; 279 seats; $ 37.50 top))

By JEREMY GERARD

A Lincoln Center Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Jack O'Brien.
 
Hapgood ... Stockard Channing
Wates ... Clifton Davis Ridley ... David Lansbury
Radio Voices ... Graeme Malcolm
Russian, Intern,
Radio Voices ... Boris McGiver
Merryweather ... Brian F. O'Byrne
Joe ... Yaniv Segal
Blair ... Josef Sommer
Kerner ... David Strathairn
Maggs ... Michael Winther
 

Few playwrights entertain as many ideas and make so many ideas entertaining as Tom Stoppard. For his efforts he's often been accused of building plays around intellectual notions rather than people, though the charge fits less and less as Stoppard's plays move ever more boldly into the knot where people and ideas tangle. With its lengthy riffs on particle physics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Strategic Defense Initiative -- remember that? --"Hapgood" was deemed too dense for a commercial audience when it opened five years ago in Los Angeles, and never moved to New York.

Well, the wait was worth it, not only because the play is hugely entertaining and often quite moving in its own right, but also because it will be followed at Lincoln Center Theater by "Arcadia," the play in which Stoppard gets everything right, and for which "Hapgood" looks like a slightly rough, if heady, dry run.

There's also a haunting echo of the boulevard sentiment of "The Real Thing" in this work, in which a character announces that "there is something terrible about love -- it uses up all one's moral judgment."

The title character is the formidable head of a British intelligence agency caught up in a scandal in which no one remains what he or she seems to be for more than about a minute.

Hapgood (Stockard Channing) plays chess without a board, breaks rules and, asked how good she is at lying, almost blithely replies, "I make a living." Kerner (David Strathairn), father of the son she keeps in boarding school, is a Russian physicist whom she turned into a double agent and who may or may not be a triple -- or even quadruple -- agent.

Hapgood's best operative, Ridley (David Lansbury) is probably selling secrets to a dying Soviet empire; her mentor Blair (Josef Sommer) is struggling to keep her out of trouble; while Wates (Clifton Davis), a nosy American operative, is doing everything he can to get her into it.

And several of these characters apparently have twins, though don't bet the bank on it.

For Kerner, science is the ultimate poetry --"every atom is a cathedral" is one of his lovelier constructs -- while for Ridley, it's the highest absurdity. Hapgood is caught between them in more ways than one, and the air among them is charged with opposites: loyalty and betrayal, love and abandonment, protection and murder, confession and deceit: "We are all in the secret service," one says bitterly.

The dark mood is established right from the outset by Bob James' genre-perfect spy thriller music and the black-and-white London street maps that projection master Wendall K. Harrington throws dizzyingly down the wall and across the floor of Bob Crowley's effectively sinister setting, with its weirdly Orwellian wall of file drawers.

No perception is to be trusted, Kerner warns, because things change by virtue of being perceived: "The act of looking determines what's what."

The pieces of this intricate puzzle don't all fit neatly, and you may not be certain, when it's finished, of just what it is you're looking at.

But with an ensemble headed by the incomparable Channing (who gets to double unforgettably as the twin Hapgood may or may not have) under Jack O'Brien's confident, cinematic direction, putting it all together is totally enjoyable.

Sets, Bob Crowley; costumes, Ann Roth; lighting, Beverly Emmons; projections, Wendall K. Harrington; sound, Scott Lehrer; music, Bob James; casting, Daniel Swee; general manager, Steven C. Callahan; production manager, Jeff Hamlin. Artistic director, Andre Bishop; executive producer, Bernard Gersten. Opened Dec. 4, 1994, reviewed Dec. 1. Running time: 2 hours, 30 min.