In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem. Here’s an excerpt.
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Tom Stoppard is the George Bernard Shaw of our time. No English-speaking playwright, not even Shaw himself, has ever been more adept at taking complex questions about human nature and embedding them in witty dramas that are at once entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Now, after a decade-long hiatus, Mr. Stoppard has returned to the stage of Lincoln Center Theater with “The Hard Problem,” in which he grapples again with a question that in one form or another has preoccupied him throughout his career: Are the materialists right, or is there more to man than mere flesh? One might reasonably expect him, at 81, to have passed his prime, but judging by a first viewing, I’m inclined to rank “The Hard Problem” alongside “Arcadia” and “The Real Thing” as one of the best things he’s given us…
Hilary (Adelaide Clemens), the protagonist, is a youthful research psychologist-in-the-making who longs above all things to crack the hardest problem in her field, the conundrum of human consciousness: “Who’s the you outside your brain? Where? The mind is extra….We’re dealing in mind-stuff that doesn’t show up in a [brain] scan—accountability, duty, free will, language, all the stuff that makes behavior unpredictable.” For her, a computer that plays chess can only be conscious if it “minds losing,” and the problem of consciousness is directly related to the problem of morality…
What makes “The Hard Problem” more than just an undergraduate bull session writ large is that Hilary is, or at least seems to be, a genuinely good person who isn’t kidding in the least when she says that altruism “means being good for its own sake.” Moreover, she believes in God and prays every night—in part because, as we learn early on, she is the mother of an illegitimate daughter whom she gave up for adoption, and for whose welfare she now prays…
Out of this promising premise, Mr. Stoppard has spun a concise piece of storytelling (100 minutes, no intermission) full of thought-provoking twists…
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Read the whole thing here.
Tom Stoppard talks about The Hard Problem:
A scene from the Court Theatre’s 2017 Chicago premiere of The Hard Problem: