Something witty happens between the first two scenes of the new staging of “The Hard Problem,” Tom Stoppard’s 2015 play, directed by Jack O’Brien, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. Two young people, a woman and a man—she’s a psychology student prepping for a big job interview at a well-funded institute for brain science, and he’s her tutor—have been arguing about love, and trust, and instinct, and the existence of unsullied human goodness, offered not out of shrouded self-interest but for its own sake. Heady fare, sure, but relatively light stuff for Stoppard. The student, Hilary Matthews (Adelaide Clemens), in whose bedroom the scene is set, is allergic to the naked selfishness implied by the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, which pits two criminals against each other in a guessing game about who might rat the other out. Spike (Chris O’Shea), the tutor, is a strict, snarky materialist, impatient with what he perceives as her naïveté. Under Stoppard’s guidance, talk like this qualifies as flirtation; soon, the conversation turns suggestive, and they end up in bed.
The lights dim, and a smiling, silent ensemble—who, during the early parts of the play, just sort of hang around the edges of the circular stage, like a casual chorus—swoop in, not to get rid of the bedroom set but to rotate it precisely on its axis, thus giving the audience a fresh view of the room. The moment’s good for a laugh, and it works, too, as a subtle restatement of the play’s obsession with subjectivity and its sources. Sometimes belief, however rationally obtained, is the product of deep, private wells of sorrow. Sometimes desire corkscrews your surroundings, making old spaces seem new. A lot depends on angles. Post-coitus, Spike returns from the bathroom, inexplicably wearing a frilly pink nightie, and discovers Hilary on her knees in prayer. Before long, they’re off again on an argument about the origins of thought and whether virtue comes from somewhere beyond science.
Much of “The Hard Problem” spins around Hilary’s quietly confident theism. Her God isn’t quite creedal, so far as we know—nowhere is the deity of any specific faith mentioned—but it is certainly personal. We’re soon given to understand that her piety depends, at least in part, on the fact that she gave birth twelve years ago, as a teen-ager, and put the baby up for adoption. She prays for her absent daughter’s safety and, also, for “forgiveness” for herself. But her belief—and her unwillingness to think of the universe as a directionless accident, or of the human mind as a collection of brute responses, totally reducible to the brain and blind to values originating outside itself—isn’t stuck in the past; it determines her future, too.
Luckily for Hilary, the boss who’s hiring for the job she wants, as a researcher, is interested in the “hard problem,” as it was called by the philosopher David Chalmers, of consciousness, and of the dichotomy between the mind and the body: are the acutely felt depths of human experience merely a physical and synaptic matter, or is there something else (or, as Hilary suspects, Someone Else) behind the cosmic veil? Hilary gets the job and makes her arguments throughout her rapid professional rise, never too worried about the derision of her atheistic peers, always lit from within by the memory of her child’s adoption; she conducts research and commissions studies with the zeal of a martyr. Almost everyone around her is aghast at the idea that she’s drawing lessons about the universe, in what should be a scientific context, from philosophy or—great horror—fiction. She references “The Grapes of Wrath” and Spike nearly has a fit.
Clemens plays Hilary with a kind of controlled fanaticism, showing at every turn the mutuality between her deepest feelings and her most challenging insights. Each informs the other. Even when the force of her attractiveness, twinned with the force of her convictions, puts her livelihood at risk—one of the weaker gags here is that everybody’s always falling in love with her, and doing stupid things as a result—her calm under moral fire feels like a relief.
The stereotype about religious belief, which Spike eagerly marshals early on, is that it is purely psychological, born of the necessities of trauma, or hardship, or plain old existential terror. Hilary’s mixture of honest anguish and sincere pursuit of the truth makes that idea moot, even as it makes her a compelling theatrical creation: we all have pasts, she seems to say, as well as the sufferings and joys that these histories bring. But reason sits just next to these contingencies—and is often nourished, not diminished, by their presence. That this makes all thought impure and difficult to parse is nothing to scoff at; it’s implicit in being human.
Unfortunately, the play fails to ask emotional questions of the characters who surround Hilary, and they tend, in their flatness, to wilt in her shadow. The likes of Spike are seldom asked—onstage, or in life—whether their smug certainty might have its roots in a more personal, less comfortable place. It might have been nice to see that question posed here. Spike is a spectacular jerk. One of the best scenes in the show is a party that he ruins; the roots of such asocial behavior might be just as harrowing as a lost child.
Hilary is our hero, to be sure, and the object of our admiration, but her depth sticks out among so much shallowness. There are interesting hints of where else the play could have gone, including a tantalizing thread concerning how evolutionary-biological positivism parallels and even fuels the disastrous logic of finance capitalism, but they’re not supported by the kinds of characters who would stand a chance at getting them across.
It’s often said of Stoppard, as a point of differentiation from other playwrights, that he is uniquely interested in presenting complex ideas onstage. That’s true as far as it goes, but there’s something redundant in the observation. To say that Stoppard is interested in ideas, and in their incarnation through bodies and in their expression through artful talk, is really only to say that he is interested in drama itself. That’s the job: grabbing the abstract out of the clouds and giving it flesh. The test—which Stoppard passes brilliantly in Hilary’s case, but elsewhere not so much—is whether the writer can tether thought to emotion, theory to the practice that is life.
Maybe in being so ostentatious about intellection—the material with which the theatrical process begins but cannot end—Stoppard is just a bit more straightforward than most playwrights, from the ancients onward, about the “hard problem” of his profession. And so, in a way, this latest play might be understood not only as one of his customary thought exercises but also as a big question about the alchemical difficulties of his work.
There’s a quick parry, during Hilary’s interview, about whether a computer, properly programmed, can be described as “thinking” in the same way as a human being. Another candidate says yes; Hilary, of course, says no. And what is a successful play but a kind of miraculously sentient machine, understandable on the level of its component parts—the legible “coding” of its creator—but also possessed of a kind of life, unexplainable but undeniably real?
Stoppard is clearly on Hilary’s side; in real life, he’s said that he tries to live “as if” there is a God, along the lines of Pascal’s wager, and rejects the conclusions of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, whose irritating mouthpiece Spike seems to be. Perhaps it’s because Stoppard knows, by dint of his work, just how tough it is—how much intention it takes—to make a soul appear. ♦
