Tom Stoppard's "The Hard Problem"

by Doctor Science

The American premiere of Tom Stoppard's latest play, "The Hard Problem", is at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. We went last Saturday, and after we got back I looked up some reviews of the world premiere run in London. Most of them seem to have found it "slight", "lesser Stoppard", and to not have felt connected to the characters, or moved by them.

It's like we're not talking about the same play. I connected with (and recognized) the characters: insofar as they're two-dimensional, it's that of cubes seen head-on. Their depths are unexplored, left for fanfic writers, but I felt as though the depths were *there*. I don't know how much of the difference is due to the production, and how much is due to me seeing things the London reviewers overlooked, but it's very disconcerting.

Cutting here for a spoiler-laden review.

Stoppard took the expression "The Hard Problem" from the work of philosopher David Chalmers, who says that consciousness is the hard problem for people who study the human mind -- whether they're philosophers, psychologists, or brain scientists.

The play is about Hilary, a scientist who wants to study The Hard Problem -- and who is also a theist who prays every night, and who believes there's more to the mind and the soul than just brain activity.

As the New Scientist reviewer noticed, Hilary's discussions and experiments aren't actually about consciousness at all, they're about altruism and our sense of goodness. It's enough to make me honestly wonder if the whole play is Stoppard is making one big pun, conscious/conscience. Or he may just be being sloppy, not really caring about the science in itself, only how it expresses itself in people.

As for the people, I was not expecting half the characters to be women, and all the women to be queer. I don't know Stoppard's oeuvre all that well -- has he ever passed the Bechdel Test before? "The Hard Problem" doesn't just pass it, it burns it to the ground. Hilary's relationships with women are vivid and engaging, with men she is much more distant.

Although the London reviewers call Hilary's one-time tutor, Spike, her "lover", the more accurate term is "fuck-buddy". They have sex, but she never seems to *like* him -- and I don't blame her, he's a perfectly accurate representation of the sort of smug atheist who says "hard-wired" *way* too often. Amal is her rival for a job at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science, who goes on to become a hedge fund "quant"; Leo is her understanding boss; Jerry Krohl is the hedge fund manager who supports the institute as he plays the big short -- the play ends in 2008, as the world economy comes crashing down.

More important, to my eyes, are Hilary's relationships with female characters. Julia is her friend from school, now out as a lesbian and partnered with Ursula, an often-tactless neuroscientist. It's when Hilary and Julia talk (as women! as friends! -- this was not what I was expecting) that we learn that Hilary has at least had a "crush" on a woman, in the past. Bo is a Chinese woman, a genius mathematician, who Hilary is mentoring and who commits academic fraud -- or at least statistical hedging [1] -- out of helpless love for Hilary.

By far the most important relationship in Hilary's life is with her daughter, Catherine. Hilary gave her up for adoption at birth -- she was only 15 -- but she thinks of her constantly; it's for Catherine that she prays. Coincidentally -- or maybe miraculously -- Catherine was adopted by the Krohls, and Hilary has a chance to meet her all unknowing.

To me, "The Hard Problem" felt very woman-centered, very much as though Hilary isn't a supporting character in her own life (which happens, all too often, to female characters and to women in reality). It's not what I expected, and it's *incredibly* refreshing.

It may be that no reviewers in London felt that way because it wasn't what they expected, either, so they didn't see it. But it may also be that the Wilma production is just plain *better* than the National Theatre one was.

In London, Hilary was played by Olivia Vinall, who may be too shockingly pretty and young-looking to convince an audience that her mind is her strong point. At the Wilma, Sarah Gliko's Hilary can be vivid or serious with equal conviction: she comes across as a *person*, first and foremost.

Gliko's performance can only be enhanced by the fact that the Wilma is becoming more of a repertory company, and most of the cast has worked together before. Even though Stoppard hasn't fully developed the characters, the actors have: they show their relationships in their bodies, as well as his words. The Wilma production also includes two more characters of color than London did -- there are only two white men with speaking roles. The fact that most of the characters are marked makes their differences seem richer, to my eye: their world covers more of the world.

The most obvious innovation in the Wilma production is that there's an extra figure on stage: Michael Pedicin, improvising on jazz saxophone. Pedicin is a session and solo musician with a PhD in clinical psychology, who teaches a course on "Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness." Director Blanka Zizka says the musician "becomes Hilary’s observer, inner voice, sorrow, and hope— her consciousness" -- but I also saw a wonderful ambiguity about whether the music is the voice of God.

Michael Pedicin and Sarah Gliko. Photo By Alexander Iziliaev. © Wilma Theater.

Overall, I strongly recommend "The Hard Problem" at the Wilma, not least because it's affordable. The Wilma is in the second year of a three-year grant from the Wyncote Foundation, under which regular tickets are $25 (!), while students and theater professionals can get seats for $10 (!!!). I love live theater, but Broadway soared out of our reach decades ago. We now have season tickets for the Wilma, and it's reminding me what's special about live performance.

---

[1] The word isn't used, so Stoppard *maybe* doesn't intend to make a connection between Bo's scientific sin and the sins of the financiers who caused the Crash ... but since the Crash and the scientific scandal happen at the same time, as co-dramatic climaxes, he probably *does*.

Comments

[Girl from the North Country]

I saw the Hard Problem at the National (on their smaller, more "experimental" stage, which was a clue since Stoppard normally plays in large, expensive venues). I think I've been to every Stoppard opening run since the 70s, with the exception of his Coast of Utopia trilogy, and I thought it was pretty poor by his standards. I am normally such an admirer that I went alone - a first solo theater (as opposed to film) outing for me. I got into a discussion with strangers in an elevator afterwards, and I said that I thought the characterisation was exceptionally poor. They said that Stoppard himself says that his characters are often stereotypes. What I should have said, I realised afterwards (l'esprit de l'escalier in action), is that in the Hard Problem they aren't just stereotypes, they are ciphers, just mouthpieces for different sides of a problem that interests Stoppard.

I felt this particularly because it is an area that I have myself been very interested in, and have in part seen treated with far more depth elsewhere, often but not exclusively by neurologists, and sometimes in theatre (e.g. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tmZL8MOf2KIC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=on+identity+mick+gordon&source=bl&ots=Wl54kHycbO&sig=ks7Jzyva4JNFEiCT-Gv-nMQJvao&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiPhqLEy6nKAhUBKA8KHbkWBOEQ6AEIMjAD#v=onepage&q=on%20identity%20mick%20gordon&f=false) (sorry about the length of that link, I don't know how to do short, elegant links).

I think the difference between the London reactions and yours must be the cast, and the musician. For example, I saw Arcadia when it first opened in 1993 , and thought it wonderful, and right up the alley of one of my best friends in LA. I had known her since childhood, we shared many interests and could always predict each other's reactions, but by the time it got to California, after several cast changes, she was astonished I thought it worth seeing.

[wj]

Casting does make a huge difference (in theater and in film).

It's kind of ironic, since a lot of directors and playwrights tend (among themselves) to refer to actors as "meat puppets." Even when they are going to great lengths to get exactly the right actor for a part.

[Doctor Science]

GirlftNC:

I'm glad to hear from someone who saw the London production. Did the woman-ness of the play not strike you as it did me? This *is* a new development for Stoppard, isn't it?

The Wilma frequently does Stoppard -- they did R&G last spring, just after Hamlet (and with an overlapping cast), and it was *great*. I think the combination of familiarity with each other, plus familiarity with the playwright, helped them workshop the play into something a *lot* better than what you saw in London.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

GFTNC: <a href="www.whatever.com">label for whatever</a>

In London, Hilary was played by Olivia Vinall, who may be too shockingly pretty and young-looking to convince an audience that her mind is her strong point.

This may be an honest assessment of commonly-held POVs, but it's a rather frustrating one.

[Girl from the North Country]

NV, here goes: http://oberonbooks.com/oberon-masters-1/theatre-and-the-mind> Mick Gordon book

[Girl from the North Country]

Hmm, I obviously did that wrong, I think I forgot the quotation marks, I'll try again

Mick Gordon book

Excellent! Many thanks, NV.

Doc, I will answer your question shortly.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

That looks like your link may have had some HTML code in it. You need just the barebone URL in the hypertext reference (href="") field.

You need to do:

<a href="http://oberonbooks.com/oberon-masters-1/theatre-and-the-mind">Mick Gordon book</a>

Which should end up looking like:

Mick Gordon book

[Walter B.]

I have heard from several people who felt the casting of Olivia Vinall posed a challenge to the meaning of the play in London. Last night a director told me me he felt the production presented her as a "siren, whom all the other characters wanted to sleep with," which certainly undercuts the possibility that her mind (or,considering the play's arguments, her soul) was what attracts them to her. (Full disclosure: I worked on the Wilma production.)

[Girl from the North Country]

OK Doc, here goes. I think it may be that the problem in London, as possibly indicated by the stage at which the National showed it, was that it may have been a kind of "soft opening", so maybe not adequately rehearsed, or even still being worked on. In fact, it is even possible that Stoppard went on working on it after the brief run in London. On the other hand, now I think of it, it was directed by Nicholas Hytner, one of our most acclaimed directors, as his last production as Artistic Director of the National Theater, so the foregoing theories seem unlikely. Maybe it was just a "lesser Stoppard" after all, and your Wilma production supplied the missing pieces by giving the characters a hinterland by means other than language.

But, to your very interesting question about the woman-ness. In the London production, they really didn't seem like real women, or real people at all. They seemed to have been supplied with just sufficient attributes, characteristics and interests to nominally carry the plot developments, or to mouth the intellectual arguments, only to the very barest extent. I don't know exactly how else to put this, but none of the characters, including the women, rang true as people. It was deeply unsatisfying.

Now, to what I think is your question about whether creating substantial women characters is a new thing for Stoppard (unless you mean in numbers sufficient to hang out, Bechdel-testwise?). I am ashamed to say that in my youth, when I was first going to plays like Travesties and Jumpers, I was sufficiently a sufferer from "false consciousness" not to notice whether the female characters were plentiful enough, or given sufficient authorial attention (no longer, happily. I agreed with you about Rey in Star Wars). But by Arcadia, which many consider Stoppard's masterpiece, see this, he was creating wonderful female characters, particularly Thomasina, who is probably based on Ada Lovelace. All I can say is, if you haven't seen Arcadia, and Wilma does it well in the future, you are in for a treat.

[Doctor Science]

GFTNC:

Aha, Mick Gordon has scooped me! Because the idea, that "theater represents a physical corollary of the invisible workings of our minds", is something I thought of as I was pondering "The Hard Problem" and working on this review! e-book is being purchased forthwith.

Walter B.: you may want to put this on your reading list, if you haven't read it already.

[Bruce B.]

Yes, centering on women is very much a new thing for Stoppard. There have been isolated moments back to like Cahout's Macbeth where plays felt like they might go in that direction, but they never did. I'm now hoping to get to see this somehow.

[Girl from the North Country]

Doc, just one further note of something you may find interesting. After seeing one of Mick Gordon's plays (I think it was On Ego) in which he had collaborated with the neuropsychologist Paul Broks, I bought Broks's book Into the Silent Land. (In fact, my first comment on ObWi was to recommend it, in your thread about Oliver Sacks's announcement of his own diagnosis). While recognisably in a genre invented by Sacks, I think it is a really good book, and well worth anybody's attention who is interested in these matters.