In December 2013, Tom Stoppard emailed Nicholas Hynter, the outgoing artistic director of the National Theatre, that he wanted “to write a play about evolutionary biology and the banking crisis. Happy Christmas.”
At the time, Stoppard hadn’t written a new work since 2006’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. Hynter admits to “nagging him twice a year since 2011” to write a play for the National, but Stoppard’s writing process is notoriously wily and unhurried. The central dramatic questions of his plays emerge from his own intellectual curiosities, and only after extended periods of in-depth research: “I have been keeping newspaper cuttings about journalism in a box for years,” Stoppard said in 2012. “There is another box of cuttings about consciousness, and another about Russia. I relish all the reading which precedes a play.”
The Hard Problem developed from this autodidactic approach—and from Stoppard’s aforementioned curiosity about the nature of consciousness. (The play’s title is a phrase coined by cognitive scientist David Chalmers to explain “the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.”) Initially conceived as two separate plays—one about philosophy and science, one about finance— Stoppard ultimately decided to combine them: “I just thought, ‘I really don’t want to waste this stuff by writing the other one,’ so I thought there’s a way in which they impinge upon each other.”
The Hard Problem is not the first Stoppard play to explore science, mathematics, and unpredictability—Arcadia, Hapgood, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead all took up the subjects to various theatrical and thematic ends. And in the grand tradition of Stoppard’s canon, these weighty ideas are complemented by his trademark linguistic dexterity and emotional complexity, illuminating the endless interplay of our hearts and our minds. “Stoppard banished the puritanical belief that a drama addressing serious ideas cannot simultaneously be playful,” writes The Guardian critic Michael Billington, “And in his best work for the theatre, he has glamorised thought and shown that the intellect and emotion are bedfellows rather than opposites.
The Hard Problem follows Hilary, a psychology graduate student, after she bests steep competition for a coveted post at a neuroscience research institute funded by Jerry Krohl, “a squillionaire with a master’s in biophysics who decided to try hedge funding.” Though Hilary lacks the hard science background of her rival interviewee, the mathematician Amal, her thinking on the problem of defining consciousness intrigues Leo, the institute’s director. When Leo asks if a machine can think, Hilary says no—even if a computer can play chess, it isn’t thoughtful: the machine is computing what it’s been programmed to do, similar to a toaster. (Unless, as Hilary remarks, you can build “a computer that minds losing…and how would you tell?”)
In a world driven by empirical data, Hilary is a controversial figure—she argues passionately in favor of free will, defends altruism as more than self-interest, and believes in God, much to the consternation of her materialist fellow scientist and occasional lover Spike. And it gradually emerges that Hilary’s stances are informed, in part, by personal reasons: at age 15, she had a baby and made an adoption plan, and now prays for her daughter as she wonders what became of her.
In constructing Hilary, Stoppard explains, “I wanted to write a character who is good—not goody-goody—and believes that goodness has an objective reality which is not captured by, explained by, or defined by evolutionary science, by evolutionary psychology, by evolutionary biology, by neo-Darwinism.” Hilary’s faith is ridiculed by her colleagues—but they can’t fully refute her stances. Stoppard investigates the interplay of faith and fact, irrationality with would-be rational behavior. How would neuroscientists definitively prove that every instinct is chemical, explicable, and geared for survival? And what happens to our beliefs when science can’t hold all the answers? Can some ideas only be understood through an unquantifiable intuition?
As he promised Nicholas Hynter, Stoppard complicates his inquiry into human motivation by merging Hilary’s story with that of the banking crisis. After Hilary beats him out for the researcher position, Amal is recruited by Jerry’s hedge fund to design computer models that manage risk in an unpredictable market. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Bo, feeling disillusioned by the world of finance, leaves the hedge fund to work as Hilary’s assistant for an experiment on egoism and altruism in children. When Bo’s research and Amal’s work yields surprising results, their individual (and opposite) actions reveal how unpredictable human behavior can be.
Like its titular scientific query, Stoppard admits, “This is a play which obviously has no ultimate answer.” The Hard Problem’s unanswerable questions offer a rich ideological turf for discovery and contemplation. Stoppard confronts, in signature fashion, the nuance between and the mechanics of the brain and the mind: “I don’t want the things which are emotionally important to be devalued by being relative to, as it were, the textbook of human life as opposed to the poem of human life.”
—Lauren Halvorsen