The Hard Problem

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 28 March 2015

Tom Stoppard's new play is directed by Nicholas Hytner (the retiring Artistic Director of the National Theatre) with Olivia Vinall as Hilary and Damien Molony as Spike. It is partly an examination of the 'hard problem' of the relation between consciousness and physics, with reflections on the questions of ethical goodness and the existence of God, and also on game theory as manifested in the machinations of the financial world.

The summary shows the grand themes jostling for attention in a single dramatic piece. Stoppard has an impressive track record in juxtaposing unexpected storylines to illustrate often abstruse philosophical questions while providing fizzing entertainment - see for example 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead', 'Jumpers', 'Travesties' and 'Arcadia'. Unfortunately this play is not one to add to the list.

There are ideas aplenty, but their exposition is too often pedestrian, not least because often a teacher or mentor is merely instructing a student or newcomer, so that we feel we are overhearing a tutorial or an induction. The clever lines are there, but the situations in which they are spoken are too often mechanical rather than integral to the characters' development or predicament. The themes of academic research and its funding on the one hand, and the relevance of game theory to the recent financial crash on the other, are linked principally by the fact that a young hopeful who failed to get a research position has done well in the financial arm of the benefactor's empire. This is a contrivance rather than an illuminating insight into the links between the two themes. Likewise the most significant coincidence on a personal level fails to develop the ethical questions raised by Hilary's attempts to be good; it is instead just weakly sentimental.

The cast did well with the material, but it does not allow for much warmth or real interaction. At least five years is supposed to have passed during the progress of the play, but there is little revealed of the relationship between Hilary and Spike during this time; what appears to be an ill-advised tutor/student affair at the beginning has no real warmth to it five years later - but then one wonders why a person such as Hilary would continue with it (even sporadically), or, for that matter, just adventitiously restart it as occasion allowed - it is not at all clear which of these things has happened. The character of Amal, using his mathematical skills in the money market, flares in an interesting way briefly in his first two scenes, but is never really brought to our attention again, as if the playwright has lost interest once the point about financial markets and game theory has been made. Many of the subsidiary characters are two-dimensional stock types, so that when an important personal engagement is intimated (for instance, between Hilary and the owner of the research institute) there is very little substance to the encounter.

The technical requirements of the play are resolved by the presence of a light installation above the stage representing the firing of neurons in the brain. This is beguilingly lit while scene changes take place below, but in a short piece there are too many scene changes, and the installation as an artwork becomes too distracting; the dramatic pace is broken . After the superb leanness of Ivo van Hove's productions of 'Antigone' and 'A View from the Bridge', this play looks too fussy, and its execution too clunky, to rank as memorable.