The Hard Problem (2015)

I stumbled across this National Theatre Live event completely by chance:  I was doing recon on their website, getting an early scoop on Hamlet showings (yes, it’s not until October, but it’s Benedict Cumberbatch – when tickets go on sale, they’ll go like gangbusters, and if I want to see it, I need to be ready,) and there, among the upcoming showings in my area, was a brand spankin’ new play by Tom Stoppard.  Do I really need to say I was so there?

So, what’s the subject of this, the first Tom Stoppard play that I’ve ever seen before reading?  It follows Hilary, a young psychology student with the aim of working for a prestigious research institute.  Unlike many of her fellow brain scholars, Hilary doesn’t hold with the idea that all the answers to who we are can be found in the hardware, that all our actions can be divined by evolutionary biology and observed by the sparks in the gray matter.  She fumbles when she tries to articulate it, but Hilary believes in something larger and unquantifiable.  Whether she calls it the mind (separate from the brain,) the soul, or the existence of God, she stands alone among her colleagues as she searches for proof of it.

In other words, it has lots of fun playing keep-away with my understanding.  It’s an interesting experience to see a Stoppard play without having read it first.  There are brilliant illuminating flashes where everything crystallizes, and for a moment, you feel intellectually invincible.  There are stretches where you think you’re following it just fine, but then you turn a corner and realize you’re utterly lost in the woods of it.  There are times when you know you don’t understand what’s being said and you don’t even mind, letting it break over you like a philosophical, semantic wave.  I definitely felt further behind than I do when I read his plays, but this order has its own excitement and immediacy.

This play feels a bit more lecture-y than many Stoppard works I’ve read, more straight-up academic discourse with less poetic wandering.  I’m not sure if that means it actually is, or if watching it sight unseen made it harder for me to access that startling Stoppardian beauty.  Undoubtedly, there are exquisite moments, but it’s not like Arcadia or The Invention of Love, where my breath catches in my throat for entire glorious speeches.  But then, they can’t all be Arcadia or The Invention of Love, or what would be the point of the ones that are?  (To take a page from Sondheim, “If live were only moments, / Then you’d never know you had one.”)  Plenty of Stoppard’s works fall short of his best, but that only means they’re not transcendent – not exactly a scathing indictment.  And of course, the wit is still there.  I’m pretty sure Stoppard can’t even help that.  As the characters discuss egoism vs. altruism, evolution vs. theology, and the possibility of artificial intelligence, they weave in any number of glittering aphorisms, cheeky or sly or insightful. 

I’m not terribly familiar with any of the actors from the production (the most familiar faces are Anthony Calf, who played Col. Fitzwilliam in the Ehle/Firth Pride and Prejudice, and Lucy Robinson from Suburban Shootout,) but they all do a commendable job with the difficult script.  Special mention goes to Damien Molony as Hilary’s tutor and sometimes-lover, who’s somehow passionate and jaded at the same time, and Parth Thakerar who, as Hilary’s would-be rival, takes full advantage of a role that’s much complex than it seems on the surface.