The Hard Problem: what’s Tom Stoppard’s secret?

As Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Hard Problem, opens at the National Theatre, Henry Hitchings uncovers the magic ingredients that make the playwright great
Stoppard through the ages: Rufus Sewell in Rock 'n' Roll, Benedict Cumberbatch in Parade's End and Felicity Kendall and Bill Nighy in Arcadia; Tom Stoppard today (right) (Pictures: Johan Persson/Alastair Muir/Nigel Barklie/Nick Briggs)
Johan Persson/Alastair Muir/Nigel Barklie/Nick Briggs
Henry Hitchings22 January 2015

Tom Stoppard's new play, The Hard Problem, is his first in nine years. A fresh work from him is always an event, and the long wait for this one has heightened the expectancy — as has his Lebedev Award at November’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards, where he was acclaimed as “the greatest living playwright”.

The production, at the National Theatre’s recently renamed and revamped Dorfman space, is also Nicholas Hytner’s last before he leaves his role as the venue’s artistic director in March.

Theatre-goers keen to know what it is about have so far had to survive on scraps of information. According to the National’s website, “Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?” In other words, what is the relationship between the physical processes that occur inside the brain and the constant stream of subjective experiences that plays like a movie inside our heads?

There are hints here of the 77-year-old theatrical knight’s familiar concerns and techniques. Stoppard treats uncertainty not as a quagmire to avoid but as fertile landscape to explore. His characters’ entwined philosophical and personal quests cause them to collide with authority, and at their most confused and helpless they experience dazzling epiphanies.

Besides these meaty themes, we can expect The Hard Problem to include a liberal helping of Stoppard’s knowing humour. And we can count on being challenged. His is a world dense with literary echoes, impromptu history lessons and intellectual ping-pong. His plays seduce with their air of enigma — but what are the magic ingredients of this unique talent?

He’s a wizard of language and space

Stoppard’s writing has an acrobat’s sense of daring. He can write a scene that consists entirely of limericks or incorporates a striptease on a trapeze. He delights in unlikely juxtapositions, such as in The Real Inspector Hound (1968), where two theatre critics are sucked into the chaotic action of a murder mystery they are meant to be reviewing.

One of his enduring subjects is the manipulative nature of drama itself. “I am quite hot on the theatricality of theatre,” he once told broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. This manifests itself as an enthusiasm for comic repetitions and visual jokes, as well as a broader concern with role-playing, spectacle and the idea of theatre as a kind of thought experiment — designed to disorientate and provoke the audience.

His particular brand of playfulness was evident in his breakthrough, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which premiered in Edinburgh in 1966 before moving to the Old Vic the following year. Perversely imagining the independent lives of two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this dizzily self-referential piece also established his interest in the peculiarities of the English language and the shortcomings of language in general.

Ever since, one of the hallmarks of a Stoppard play has been this attention to the vexed relationship between words and meaning. Yet even as he highlights the absurd inconsistencies of language, he deploys it with Wildean elegance.

He’s as much heart as head

The pyrotechnics of Stoppard’s comedies of ideas, such as Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974), sparked claims that his work was cryptic and impersonal. But with The Real Thing (1982) his writing took on a greater emotional richness. Whether or not it is a work of self-exposure (as was widely diagnosed when it premiered), this portrait of a playwright who claims he can’t depict love turns out to be a humane study of passion, authenticity and infidelity. Since then he has returned repeatedly to those subjects.

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He’s master of screen as well as stage

We see the more tender side of Stoppard in the unabashedly populist Shakespeare in Love. Here his witty and flirtatious script (actually a revision of one by Marc Norman) refreshes the tired genre of romantic comedy.

It’s also a reminder of the extent of his work for the screen. This has mainly consisted of adapting novels or polishing other people’s screenplays, rather than creating original scripts. Many of the projects have felt tailor-made for him — an adaptation for the BBC of Ford Madox Ford’s caustic and romantically charged Parade’s End, or the upcoming film of Deborah Moggach’s sumptuous and slippery novel Tulip Fever.

A little more surprising, perhaps, is his (uncredited) involvement in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. But he has long been a sought-after script doctor — adept at shuttling between cerebral projects and popular culture.

He does politics without polemics

Major playwrights are expected to shake up the political landscape. Stoppard has tended to shy away from the idea that theatre can be an instrument of social change. But in the Seventies he began to take a public stand on human rights, focusing on dissident writers and freedom of speech, and his writing has increasingly embraced political issues, without becoming combative.

His 2006 play, Rock ’n’ Roll, is a vision of music’s influence on the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution. With typical agility he moves from Pink Floyd to state-sponsored brutality via the Greek poetry of Sappho.

At the same time the play is a personal tribute — to his friendship with his fellow playwright Václav Havel and to his own status as what he has called a “bounced Czech”. For although Stoppard has spent three-quarters of a century in Britain and seems the embodiment of a certain kind of suave Englishness, he was born in the Moravian town of Zlín (whose other celebrated offspring include Ivana Trump).

Stoppard’s most sustained attempt to bring political history to life is The Coast of Utopia (2002). This trilogy, which spans more than 30 years in pre-revolutionary Russia, is plainly the fruit of deep research. But what makes it most impressive is its sense of the bruising personal impact of history’s great upheavals.

He brings the wonder of science to the stage

The greatest upheavals of our own time are scientific and technological, and it is no surprise that The Hard Problem should focus on researchers studying the mechanics of the mind.

Forty years ago, cultural commentator Clive James observed that the key to Stoppard’s artistic vision lay “as much in modern physics as in modern philosophy”. James was prescient about the path the playwright would take. Stoppard’s first explicitly scientific play was Hapgood (1988), which made intricate connections between espionage and quantum physics. Five years later, in Arcadia, he achieved a perfect blend of technical and emotional complexity.

Arcadia is Stoppard’s masterpiece — ingenious and exhilarating. On one level it is a country-house comedy, on another a ravishingly sophisticated foray into chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics. Here the polymathic playwright juggles thoughts about landscape gardening, entropy, the love life of Lord Byron and the conflict between the intellect and the heart.

It is a play in which one character’s feelings are in a state of tropical humidity that “would grow orchids in her drawers in January”, while another remarks that “a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence”.

Stoppard excites audiences with his ability to educate and entertain at the same time. At his best, as in Arcadia, he is both a master of tragicomedy and a disarmingly brilliant guide to vast or esoteric subjects. And as he turns in The Hard Problem to pondering the nature of consciousness, he once again shares his love of confronting the biggest of big ideas.

The Hard Problem is in rep at the National’s Dorfman, SE1 (020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk) January 28-April 16

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