{"id":1032,"date":"2015-01-31T17:02:27","date_gmt":"2015-01-31T17:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2015-02-02T12:28:02","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T12:28:02","slug":"what-is-the-hard-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2015\/01\/what-is-the-hard-problem.html","title":{"rendered":"What is “The Hard Problem”?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Olivier<\/a>

Olivier Vinall (Hilary) photograph by Johan Persson<\/p><\/div>\n

The Hard Problem,<\/em> Sir Tom Stoppard\u2019s first stage play since 2006, begins with what you have to call Stoppardian promise: a bit of dialogue that misleads the audience about its actual subject. We hear a 30-something man tell a 22-year-old woman\u201d: \u201cYou\u2019re looking at two years. The jewellery was under the floorboards. The police have nothing to connect you to the scene of the robbery.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t about a crime. It\u2019s a thought experiment, a discussion between academics about the game theory problem known as the prisoner\u2019s dilemma (though, as it necessarily involves two players, it should surely be \u201cthe prisoners\u2019 dilemma\u201d).<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re off to a great start, in this 100-minute, no-interval performance in the National Theatre\u2019s nicely remodelled auditorium now renamed the Dorfman Theatre. Outgoing NT director Nicholas Hytner directs a good cast starring Olivia Vinall (who has been excellent as Juliet, Cordelia and Desdemona) as the 22-year-old (when the play begins) student, Hilary, with a splendid set by Bob Crowley, featuring an expressive overhead light sculpture representing the tangled neurons and circuits of a brain. The only (curiously) wrong notes were a bit of Bach played on the piano by Benjamin Powell (according to the programme \u2013 but from where I sat in Row K I was unable to tell whether the music was live or recorded.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Hard Problem\u201d for neuroscience is, of course, consciousness, and the characters, most of them entitled to call themselves \u201cscientists\u201d of one sort or another, and employed at \u201cthe Krohl Institute for Brain Science\u201d have a good deal of fun dismissing the attempts by non-scientifically trained philosophers to give an account of consciousness. Judging from the heroine, Hilary\u2019s actions at the conclusion of the piece, however, I think Sir Tom\u2019s sympathies lie with the lampooned philosophers (with whom I spent my own lapsed-academic past).<\/p>\n

Hilary has a God-problem, ostensibly because \u201cevery theory proposed for the problem of consciousness has the same degree of demonstrability as divine intervention.\u201d It enrages her lover and former tutor, Spike, that she concludes from this that the Divine Intervener is the kind of god that you pray to on your knees, and I have to agree with Spike. It makes for a dramatically implausible character \u2013 despite Hilary\u2019s secret sorrow, the baby she had at 15 and gave up for adoption \u2013 she\u2019s just too clever to be saying bedtime prayers because she\u2019s a closet Cartesian.<\/p>\n

Underlying much of the piece is the late Ronald Dworkin\u2019s acknowledgment of transcendent religious feelings, his \u201creligion without God,\u201d which Stoppard ably sums up in his programme note: \u201cWe had defined our God in terms of our values, so our values must have pre-existed God, rather than deriving from God.\u201d And behind this, thinks Stoppard, is the quarrel between materialism and \u201c \u2018substance dualism\u2019 (two substances: body and mind).\u201d<\/p>\n

As Hilary says, before the best line in the play (about whether a chess-playing computer can ever be said to be \u201cthinking\u201d), this is deep stuff. Her idea of \u201cdeep,\u201d she says, is \u201ca computer that minds losing.\u201d I have avoided trying to describe the \u201cplot\u201d of The Hard Problem<\/em>, the love interests and even the characters, because the play is really a set of interlocking though not always consequential philosophical arguments. (Never mind that most of the characters are meant to represent philosophy-hostile scientists: in this respect they\u2019re simply silly; though it may clarify them, no amount of experience is going to settle any of these arguments.)<\/p>\n

From Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, <\/em>and Arcadia<\/em> to The Coast of <\/em>Utopia, I have admired Stoppard\u2019s work at least as much, and often more, than that of any living playwright, and looked forward to The Hard Problem<\/em> with eagerness, despite having already read some poor reviews, saying that it lacked drama.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid this is all too true, so much so that I wondered why it wasn\u2019t sent back for a re-write before being produced. But I can answer my own question: this is a piece that reads better than it plays. I can well understand the enthusiasm of those responsible for its presentation. The script is gripping, the characters leap from the page, and \u2013 this is important \u2013 the time sequence is clear, which it is not in the actual staging, where it is not apparent that years have passed between some of the piece\u2019s eleven scenes and the characters have aged accordingly. The Hard Problem<\/em> reminds me of reading the arguments in Thomas Mann\u2019s The Magic Mountain<\/em>, pages and pages of them, as listened to and witnessed by Hans Castorp, between the humanist Settembrini and the radical Naphta. Like these, Hilary\u2019s arguments with the other characters (of which most of the dialogue consists) all work on the page \u2013 but not on the stage. Stoppard\u2019s writing here is full of intellectual passion, even zeal. He loves the subject and has strong feelings about the positions advocated and represented. What he\u2019s written, though, is a very good novella, and not a play at all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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The Hard Problem, Sir Tom Stoppard\u2019s first stage play since 2006, begins with what you have to call Stoppardian promise: a bit of dialogue that misleads the audience about its actual subject. We hear a 30-something man tell a 22-year-old woman\u201d: \u201cYou\u2019re looking at two years. The jewellery was under the floorboards. The police have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-gE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1037,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}