With Hapgood (1988) and Arcadia (1993), Tom Stoppard consciously mined advances in contemporary science and crafted those advances into a uniquely Stoppardian brand of stageworthiness. It is important to note, however, that even before 1988 Stoppard demonstrated an interest in the sciences, a point noted by Clive James, who concluded as far back as 1975 that “the appropriate analogies” throughout Stoppard’s career “lie just as much in modern physics as in modern philosophy.” Many earlier works ingeniously warp time and space, while others suggest a budding chaotics paradigm at work. A voracious reader of science texts, Stoppard even credits James D. Watson’s The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA with providing him a description of his writing process.

With Hapgood and Arcadia, science plays a central and conspicuous role, even to the point of drawing from clearly identifiable sources. Katherine E. Kelly observes that significant portions of dialogue by Kerner, Hapgood’s resident quantum physicist, derive directly “from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, especially those in chapter 37, ‘Quantum Behavior.’” And for Arcadia, Stoppard acknowledges a debt to James Gleick’s popular Chaos: Making a New Science. Stoppard has a son who was a student of physics during this period, which may also in part explain this interest. Clearly, though, Hapgood is Stoppard’s first play overtly utilizing ideas culled from contemporary science for thematic as well as structural purposes.