Stoppard’s brain weighs in

By Robert Butler

It's nine years since Tom Stoppard’s last stage play and 13 since his last at the National Theatre. As audiences enter the recently rechristened Dorfman Theatre, they are confronted by a steel sculpture—silver vertical poles and loopy curves—that hangs over the stage like a giant chandelier. In the first scene, this abstract representation of three pounds of grey matter will be compared to a map of the underground “with 86 billion stations connected 30 trillion ways, hard-wired for me first”. It’s been a long wait, but we are back in Stoppard’s universe.

Since it takes consciousness as its subject, “The Hard Problem” can literally claim to be the most cerebral of Stoppard’s 40-or-so plays. Can the mind stand apart from the body? Can scientific materialists ever explain how a metaphor works? And where, in all this, does “good” fit in? No other playwright sets the bar so high when it comes to eschewing small talk. By the second scene, two of the characters are lying semi-naked under a single duvet in a bedsit discussing God, Darwin, DNA, virtue and cost-benefit competition. If this feels more than usually divorced from the exchanges we might expect in a post-coital situation, it’s also strangely familiar: people talk to each other this way in a Stoppard play.