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There is only one playwright on the planet who could change the way you think about human existence in 90 minutes and leave you wishing there was a bit more to his new play. And that playwright is the great Tom Stoppard.
‘The Hard Problem’ comes with an almost unfair weight of expectations: it’s Stoppard’s first play in nine years; it follows 2006’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’, which WAS an unqualified success, and there is, face facts, every chance that it’ll be the 77-year-old’s final stage work.
‘The Hard Problem’ follows Hilary (Olivia Vinall), a young psychology researcher who is attempting to unravel the riddle of whether there is such thing as a truly good person – something she has personally attempted to be ever since a trauma in her teens.
Much of the play is set at the Krohl Institute, a high-powered research centre where Hilary is hired and taken in under the wing of the eccentric Leo (Jonathan Coy). He’s a cranky professor who rejects better qualified candidates because he likes her spirited – some might say naive – determination to pick away at the questions science seems incapable of answering. Namely, the hard problem: if existence is only matter, what is consciousness?
And there’s, er, not really much more to the plot than that: Hilary occasionally indulges in bickering sexposition with Damien Molony’s hunky cynic Spike; there is a slightly hard-to-swallow (though partly justified) resolution to her trauma; and in the background the economy tanks. Vinall is a compelling actor, and Hilary’s not a total drip, but you kind of wish there was more to her than earnest goodness and background sorrow, while the other characters barely scrape two dimensions between them. As a drama, I couldn’t help but think it’s overshadowed by Lucy Prebble’s not dissimilar ‘The Effect’, which played the same theatre a couple of years back.
But no playwright does ideas like Stoppard, and the arguments he places in his characters’ mouths both for and against the possibility of something more to our existence are lucid, digestible, immaculately researched and at moments almost dazzlingly audacious – in one scene he appears to make a case that the collapse of the stockmarkets is evidence for the possible existence of God. With typical Stoppardian mischief, ‘The Hard Problem’ is probably the most eloquent case for agnosticism you’ll ever see. And Nicholas Hytner’s old-fashioned, light-touch production is the perfect vehicle.
Not champagne Stoppard, but still quintessentially Stoppard: if this is last act of his stage career, then he goes out undimmed.
'The Hard Problem' will be broadcast live to cinemas on April 16