5 star review for 'The Hard Problem' from the Daily Mail

 “Here are 100 minutes of condensed brain-ache, marbled by wit and some camisoled sexiness..

Damien Molony.. keeps stripping to his rippling six-pack.”

100 minutes of brilliant brainache... it's the new Stoppard: QUENTIN LETTS first night review of The Hard Problem

By QUENTIN LETTS FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 23:51, 28 January 2015 | UPDATED: 23:53, 28 January 2015

The Hard Problem

by Tom Stoppard, Royal National Theatre

Rating: 

Sir Tom Stoppard, nosing out of harbour with his first play for eight years, tackles the God vs Science question. He comes to no firm conclusion – none I could discern, anyway, though Stoppard is notoriously knotty.

Yet amid the words, words, words, he and director Sir Nicholas Hytner deliver spectacle, stimulation and preppy wryness.

Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Stoppard? Sir Tom’s plays require leaps of faith. They achieve a centrifugal, barely understood force – cerebral chutzpah, slyly staged.

 

 

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Leap of faith: Damien Molony and Olivia Vinall as Spike and Hilary in Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem

 

 

Here are 100 minutes of condensed brain-ache, marbled by wit and some camisoled sexiness (egghead Stoppard does sometimes veer close to dirty-old-man territory).

Hilary, a minor-university psychology student, beds / is bedded by her male tutor. Hilary (Olivia Vinall) is pert, blonde and may not be wearing smalls beneath that skimpy shift. Her lover Spike (Damien Molony, with an accent wobbling between Dublin and New York) keeps stripping to his rippling six-pack.

All this time the lovers talk in spaghetti-length sentences about Darwinism and the logical impossibility of altruism. Welcome to Planet Stoppard.

More by animal cunning than intellect, Hilary wins a job at a neuroscience institute funded by a vicious hedge-fund billionaire, Krohl (Anthony Calf). His red-clawed attitude – he is brutal to his City associates – is law-of-the- jungle stuff. Yet as one of his underlings (Parth Thakerar) observes, ruthless markets do occasionally behave irrationally. So much for the empiricism of survival genes.

The staging is spare, modern: decorated by an overhang of neon lights that burst into pretty, multi-coloured activity between scenes. This represents the whirrings of the brain. Set changes are accompanied by rich, ornate piano music.

Orthodox atheist Spike is amazed when Hilary kneels to pray. She dismisses his rationalist attacks on God. She is drawn to the ‘hard problem’ of distinguishing between brain activity and awareness.

Exactly how are we conscious? Might our ability to love not be evidence of raw goodness? Are altruists decent out of a desire for Darwinian self-advancement or out of plain generosity? What sweet irony it is that this show is being staged at the National’s studio theatre, recently renamed the Dorfman after some deep-pocketed foreign-exchange slicker!

 

 

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Olivia Vinall, pictured right, declares herself a 'significant talent,' writes Quentin Letts

 

Hilary has a personal secret – a childless sadness. Her softness and openness are in contrast to the sarcastic certitude of the scoffing rationalists but she comes a bit of a cropper when a thesis is found to have used false data. Scientific purity has undone her.

But then a (quite easily guessed) plot twist hauls us back to that elusive concept called love.

The Hytner era at the National has seen several angry bites at religion. Yet leaving this show, one senses a reluctance to give in entirely to the bleakness of atheism. Perhaps the metropolitan baby-boomers are slowly waking up to the essential humanity of faith.

Altruism is not unknown in theatre critics. Newspapermen resent Sir Tom’s recent, foolish flirtation with anti-Fleet Street zealotry but I find myself able to ignore that, along with some creaky plot moments (baddy Krohl is implausibly relaxed towards Hilary at the end of the play).

The Hard Problem is that most irrational of things – a cool theatrical event. Amid several good performances, Miss Vinall declares herself a significant talent. This show is admirably high-minded – a proper duty of the subsidised arts – yet not as cryptic as some past Stoppards.

It succeeds, in my view triumphantly, because audiences will be helped to address the greatest issue facing today’s West, while still being able to form pointless, illogical attachments to fictitious characters.

The Richard Dawkins aggressively secular view of the world is ultimately conquered by the alchemy – the altruism – of theatrical imagination.