The Hard Problem: A Play

by Tom Stoppard

Above all don't use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science.

The Hard Problem is a tour de force, exploring fundamental questions of how we experience the world, as well as telling the moving story of a young woman whose struggle for understanding her own life and the lives of others leads her to question the deeply held beliefs of those around her.

Hilary, a young psychology researcher at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question. She and other researchers at the institute are grappling with what science calls the "hard problem"--if there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? What Hilary discovers puts her fundamentally at odds with her colleagues, who include her first mentor and one-time lover, Spike; her boss, Leo; and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Philosophy, Fiction, Theatre, Audiobook, British Literature

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 5, 2015

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard remains my favorite living playwright. His The Hard Problem is not going to be my first choice for a first timer. As always his plays are wordy, thought provoking and require you to be an intelligent and active reader/audience. He does not do Cats, extravaganzas or pie in the face comedy. Instead, Stoppard has anticipated much of what the newest versions of Artificial Intelligence is making us confront.

If everything is mechanics, or as we would now say algorithms, what is consciousness, or for that matter, soul, good deeds, art or even homework? About ten years back computers gained the ability to pass the Touring test, and convince a questioner that machine coding can generated replies that could convince a questioner they were quizzing a human. I have looked as one of the common AI platforms and believe a person could become a successful book reviewer using AI only. My proof that I am a human is that AI does not default to the kinds of typos and poor grammar that is too often part of my reviews.

The Hard problem places a humanist, a God believing very smart woman into a company working and researching to the edges of what computers can do. On the mind of all cast members is the problem of explaining (converting into code), good deeds. In particular and the notion of a unselfish human behavior. How to posit a word controlled by Darwin, and neural synapses and, in a word, mechanics, that sill has, or seems to have humans doing things and thinking in ways that seem to defy the merely mechanical.

As long as the questions are only into the inability of human, good to be predictable, the cases made by Stoppard makes good points. You are expected to think and think beyond your present beliefs. This is a sign of high art.

At no point is the audience asked to define terms like, “God” or “religion” such that the entire play is one-sided. No audience member is equally challenged on the other side of what would otherwise be a debate. There is one mention of, but only dismissive of quantum effects. The notion that there is never 100% cause and effect certainty, only a chance of this versus that outcome. Likewise, there is an under valuation of the evolutionary benefits of altruism, except to suggest that doing good can be no more than insuring reciprocal benefits from the favored. A lot of dialoged becomes unnecessary if we consider, evolution favors variety, such that there are always many variations of behaviors being tested.

There is a powerful, unexpected twist in the end. I am not sure I fully appreciate it. A lovely case of confirmation bias. Why who did what is important, it will take me at least another read and a lot of thinking to ‘get it’. Another sign of an artist at work.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is the “hard problem”? It’s a question about the nature of consciousness and how the brain processes experience. Bored already? But Tom Stop[pard is writing this, so he’s smart and clever and might raise useful questions we need to consider. I recall reading Stoppard’s Arcadia a few years ago, so decided to try this, but it also explores related questions that neuroscientists think of as irrelevant or possibly non-existent such as what is good? What is altruism? What is love? What is faith in God? What is beauty? Subjective stuff, you know.
I am not a scientist so may be getting the hard problem wrong here but fundamentally it seems to me is about whether humans are anything more than the sum of their biology. From time to time neurobiologists insist that love is just lust or self-interest. And I am doing meditation with Sam Harris (an app), a neurobiologist who keeps hammering the point that there is no self, consciousness is just sensations, that we are a “cloud of sensations” and so on (I may need something more claiming, I know).
In other words, according to Harris (and others) we are just the sum total of our biology. I’m no longer religious, but Harris maybe best known for taking on religious people in various books.

In this play Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute is in grief, and believes in God, to whom she prays as her colleagues seem very cynical about anything but their AI-based belief that computers answer all of our central questions. These guys are almost uniformly jerks, in case you wonder who Stoppard is siding with, by the way.

I listened to an LA Theater Works production of this play as looting and rioting and killing happened all within miles of me, as I took a “healing”?? Selfish? run, wondering if people can really love each other, whether racial hatred can actually end, whether we are in fact hard-wired for greed and self-interest and Ayn Randian individualism or whether altruism and empathy and cooperation and democracy are even still (or were they ever) possible in what seems to be an ever-receding goal of saving the human race. Stay tuned. Curfew at 9, when we lock the door and take off our Covid masks and become increasingly distrustful of each other as a madman waves a Bible and threatens violence as a way of helping us unify as a country Can we get out of this nightmare? Now THAT’S a truly hard problem not unrelated to the one Stoppard was talking about.

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Darwin doesn’t do sentimental. If you want something cuddly, try business studies.”

”I’m not thrown by sharing an ancestor with a grunting chimpanzees — evolution by natural selection, bring it on! It’s only that millions of years later the chimp is still grunting and you’re using words like hypothesis, so I’m wondering if there’s something they left out.”

”But with consciousness, with the Mind/Body Problem, the God idea shoves itself to the front like a doctor at the scene of an accident, because when you come right down to it, the body is made of things, and things don’t have thoughts.”

”You believe a thermostat has consciousness potential, but find God a bit of a stretch?“

”I’m sorry, but if you separate what you can’t understand from anatomy you’re going backwards to Plato. The brain is physical and there’s no other kind of stuff out there — there’s no beans that haven’t been counted.”

If you like your entertainment to challenge you to think, Tom Stoppard is your guy. He writes brilliant, erudite plays exploring complex and difficult ideas. In this one, the title reflects that. The hard problem referred to in the title is the mind/body problem along with its corollary conundrums of is there a God? and does altruism exist? Stoppard gives us a play where a bunch of terribly sharp people use language like witty weapons debating these issues. Stoppard doesn’t directly indicate how he feels about it, but if you pay attention to who is most sympathetic and who generally acts like assholes, you should figure out which side he favors.

[Livinginthecastle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This pales in comparison with Arcadia, there are no beautiful imaginative leaps, the characters are boring and are just argumentative viewpoints, more likely to be found in an essay, made into ‘human’ characters. There’s a Casualty storyline involving adoption and I could see the twist a mile off. All a bit detached, it didn’t delve deep enough into the consciousness problem, which was the most interesting part, and the play kind of meandered away from it.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you wanna challenge your mind
Or you are interested in philosophical issues
And making questions about whole life, science, God and etc.
This is a good play to read!
But you should know something before that or in another hand while reading it forced you to search about some definition.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard is the sort of playwright where I think he can simply do no wrong. This one though, whilst still pretty interesting, was way off the mark when compared to the likes of Arcadia.

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spike: That’ll teach the selfish little bastard how to behave. I don’t see that we have much to feel superior about, as a species. Altruism is always self-interest, it just needs a little working out.
Hilary: Like you going miles out of your way to give me a lift home?
Spike: Exactly. It’s a cost-benefit thing. I go miles out of my way because you might invite me in for coffee, and I throw in a tutorial to get into your--
Hilary: Pants.
Spike: Good graces, I was going to say. But you’re basically right on the biology.
Hilary: I’d rather not complicate . . .
Spike: Hey, I’m your tutor, it would be an abuse of trust without precedent in higher education.
Hilary: It’s a cost-benefit thing.

An elliptical joy-ride around the race course, a dutiful examination of a few branches of the Natural Sciences, a nod to Physics or its Meta cousin, a tilt to the Social Sciences, some digs at Academia, and a wary glimpse of how practicality and commerce may make uncomfortable traveling companions on this track. Everything we've come to expect from Mr. Stoppard, about whom I've long ago given up trying to be objective; everything he does is good, I'm afraid, and his flashes of brilliance-- are blinding.

Without going into detail, we have here yet another well-trained Stoppardian Squad of probingly intuitive characters, who slip and fall in the clinches, possibly due to willful denial, maybe due to setting up a cunning pratfall, and occasionally just due to being human. Stoppard's constant preoccupation is with the astounding capacity of mankind to be curious, to be intrepid in their imaginations --but tethered always to an earthbound humanity in their actual reach. Also of course, in their ability to be ridiculous.

This play is not Major Stoppardia, but it is one thing that all the other ramparts of the realm may not be, quite: short, sweet, one from the heart. Five the hard way. Stars that is.

[Chris Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this at one sitting - so it was certainly readable. But I was surprised how disappointed I was, after looking forward to it for some while. Reading a play is different from seeing it performed, but it is after all 'theatre of ideas'. I was expecting more originality, more killer arguments, more synthesis. Instead it seemed to counterpose a scientific/evolutionary/physicalist/naturalistic/algorithmic straw man with the same old wishful thinking. It read like something I had heard many times before - which is just what I didn't expect. I would love to know what Ian McEwan would have made from the same material.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

What keeps me coming back to Stoppard is that he consistently creates drama - which I care deeply about - for the theatre - which I care deeply about - confronting the hard human problems - which I care deeply about - in Science - which I care deeply about - and art - which I care deeply about - and love - which I care deeply about - and human life - which I care deeply about.
"The Hard Problem" is another in a long line of Stoppard plays that demand of the audience that they be the best, the brightest, the most thoughtful, the most loving that they can be.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Recently, I had the pleasure of participating in a pair of readings of a play inspired by this one. This was fun for a wide range of reasons, among them making this Stoppardian aware of some new works I had yet to encounter: the work under discussion, Night and Day (which I think I had read and forgotten), and Leopoldstadt, the American premiere of which I now eagerly await. I liked the forgotten Night and Day. Not so much The Hard Problem, which read like an unfocused first draft the author was too lazy to rewrite and fix.

Stoppard's plays are usually chock-full of ideas. He likes to use dialectic for dialogue, populating his plays with intellectuals chosen for that purpose -- academics, scientists, tutors, philosophers, revolutionaries, theater critics, and other pontificators -- pitting them against domestic and professional foils. When the device works, as it often does in Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Jumpers and The Invention of Love, the result is as edifying as it is emotionally satisfying. When it doesn't, as here in The Hard Problem and also in Hapgood it can be tedious, leaving playgoers restless for the various bloviates to shut up and get on with the plot. Stoppard also fails in Travesties, but that earlier work is only dialectic, with a narrator's garbled reminiscences replacing domestic foils and the end result is confusion.

Generally speaking, the issue is not the sophistication of the subject matter, but how effectively it is executed. The stage allows for a full continuum from the abstraction of a wordless ballet to the voyeuristic specificity of a conference room exhibiting meeting attendees. Here, Stoppard presents a traditional narrative with characters more or less grounded in reality. He gives us a central protagonist (the scientist Hilary) and shows us scenes in typical chronological order, with cause, effect, and consequences. This work is neither absurdist nor preachy, but a story that requires its audience to care about what happens to its protagonist. The success or failure of any story depends on the presence of a conflict with personal consequences, the outcome of which -- whether resolved or not -- has apparent significance. As it turns out, that's a hard problem for The Hard Problem, as anyone seeking to mount this play is going to have to figure out what to emphasize.

The plot is straightforward enough: Hilary worries and wonders about the welfare of the child she gave up for adoption, projecting her guilt and grief into religious expression. At home, she says a lot of prayers. At work, she hopes to present God as an explanation for consciousness. At the end of the show, having explicitly or by analogy come to learn what happened to her daughter, she leaves town and changes jobs. So what's the conflict and how is it resolved? Is it regret? A sense of loss? Maternal feelings that lack a vessel to receive them? Any of these would be personal, character-based concerns, but nothing in the text of the play provides explicit closure to them. The reader will not learn from the text how or whether the information Hilary gets about her child has impacted her. There is no metatext to prescribe her reaction to the news, no epilogue to show changes (or lack of changes) in her behavior.

If the show's theme is expressed via the implication that Hilary's (ergo a human's) intellectual (conscious) pursuits are commanded by emotional (animalistic) obsessions, then we have another problem. There's no buildup or reflection within the play that would permit for a thematic payoff or conclusion. Although it is clear that our protagonist is alienated from prevailing scientific orthodoxy, there are no apparent repercussions for this. Why should we care? Nothing in the text of the play provides explicit closure to resolve the dispute, no one's minds are changed. Our hero changes jobs, not because she cannot win, but for unrelated reasons, a mistake made by a junior colleague for which she accepts responsibility. Her ideological break from her peers never reaches a crisis point. We move on, not forward, and somewhat aimlessly.

Even the nature of consciousness as a purely intellectual conceit is left unsatisfied by this work. By establishing a false dichotomy between the supernatural (consciousness is a gift from God) and materialism (consciousness emerges from matter, chiefly the biology of the brain), Stoppard's presentation of "the hard problem" was out of date when he wrote it and incomplete. (There is at least a third view, namely that the perception of consciousness is an emergent side-effect of complex interconnectivity, for reasons as yet unexplained. For all I know there may well be other views in circulation.) The author does not bring any of these ideas to bear, nor does his text leave the audience to argue with or accept particular conclusions on the debate. The science is window-dressing paraded as substance, which directors will struggle to fix.

I found all this to be disappointing, but there was one thing in this work that actually infuriated me. In both this work and Night and Day, Stoppard tries to make a case for coincidence in fiction. That is, in each show, he announces the existence of a coincidence in the plot by having his characters tell one another (and thus, the audience), "What you are about to see involves a seemingly unlikely coincidence, but because life is full of these, you should accept them in fiction." I'm paraphrasing, but it is that direct. To me, this comes across like Stoppard self-consciously lampshading a lazy writer's crutch. To the extent that coincidence shapes the course of events in nonfiction, it remains at best a curiosity, something that invites "what if" speculation. We accept it, because we acknowledge that accidents are unscripted (if scripted, they are in fact consequence and not coincidence). Fiction, which is by definition scripted, therefore precludes fortuitous events, inasmuch as these undermine conflict.

Allow me to unpack this. As pattern-seeking creatures, we have heightened sensitivity to coincidence; we are more likely to notice when it occurs and may think it occurs even when it has not. Since all fiction reflects the intentions of the author, every plot element is inherently artificial. The craft of the storyteller can be judged by how natural, how directly connected, each event is to its antecedent. We delight in the unexpected, less so the illogical and arbitrary, if only because skill lies in weaving a deliberate pattern, not just tying together a series of unrelated events and sentences. Flagging a plot element is not a problem in and of itself, inasmuch as any given plot point can have positive, negative, or no effect on the story's conflict: the protagonists' struggle, the stakes, what we are asking audiences to care about and invest a couple of hours of their time to engage. So, coincidence that creates new, unanticipated obstacles for a protagonist is acceptable, because it heightens conflict. By contrast, coincidence that removes obstacles for a protagonist weaken conflict, and frustrate audience investment in the predicament. It's no fun and violates the audience's trust that the author will reward their engagement. So, no, Tom. Such coincidences are rightly unforgiveable. Finally, coincidences that have no impact on the story are irrelevances best avoided for the same reason crying "wolf" is bad. Calling the audience's attention to nothing in particular is bound to disappoint and disengage them from the narrative.

To his detriment, Stoppard seems not to recognize these distinctions. The coincidence introduced in Night and Day that awkwardly reunites the strangers of a one night stand threatens both with exposure and serves to intensify their personal dilemmas. This is interesting and a tentpole of the plot. By contrast, the coincidental introduction of a child into The Hard Problem's adoption mystery threatens to derail the entire plot a mere three scenes into the play. That a production might choose to render this event irrelevant is no saving grace. And Stoppard deliberately calls attention to and tries to excuse it with an extended dialogue about the nature of coincidence in life and fiction!

Some consider Stoppard to be a provocateur. The Hard Problem does get me riled up, but for mostly the wrong reasons. I still have high hopes for Leopoldstadt, though. Stay tuned for an update.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps I would have given this play a higher rating if I had seen a performance rather than just hearing it. It was about a subject that I find interesting - the "hard problem" of the difference between brain & mind (which spreads to such fascinating dilemmas such as does conscience develop as a result of the physical brain function, does evolution bias humans towards selfishness, etc.) I liked the ending very much - Hilary's decision to get a degree in philosophy.

Listened to via the LATW website.

[David Beeson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking machines, machines that don’t think. Financial wizards who make or lose billions. The experts who model their behaviour or fail to. The sense that love is somehow irreducible to the random motion of molecules. And coincidences which may not be.

After a gap of nearly ten years, Tom Stoppard has come back with another play, The Hard Problem, that is right up there with his best. The hard problem of the title is the question of mind-matter dualism: if the universe is made of nothing but matter and motion, without God or spirit, then where does thinking come from?

No less a figure than Alan Turing answered quite simply, in his notion of the “imitation game”, that if a machine appears to think so that we can’t tell whether it is or it isn’t, then we have to assume it is. That viewpoint suggests that we can build simple thinking machines, made up of electronic components. We ourselves are far more complex, and made up of organic components, but in essential principle, we are the same. The fact that we can’t build a human being, though we can build a computer, doesn’t refute the general proposition, that we like they are thinking machines.

Stoppard doesn’t do philosophical treatises, he writes plays. So The Hard Problem isn’t a dissertation, it’s a play with human characters who have emotions and react to each other. The setting is a research institute for “brain science”, financed by a man who’s made a fortune in financial services. Most of the scientists are psychologists; at the start of the play, the protagonist Hilary is there for an interview, as is Amal who despite his brilliance in mathematics as well as neuro-science, draws attention more by his uncanny knack for predicting movements in the financial markets.

It is through their contrasting views that we explore the questions of whether our thinking is determined by our physical make-up, or whether we have free will, of whether we’re just thinking machines or not.

“Computers compute. Brains think. Is the machine thinking?” asks one of the psychologists.

He receives a reply Turing would have approved, from Amal.

“If it’s playing chess and you can’t tell from the moves if the computer is playing white or black, it’s thinking.”

That’s not a view Hilary can accept, because:

“It’s not deep. If that’s thinking. An adding machine on speed. A two-way switch with a memory. Why wouldn’t it play chess? But when it’s me to move, is the computer thoughtful or is sitting there like a toaster? It’s sitting there like a toaster.”

“So, what would be your idea of deep?”

“A computer that minds losing.”

Losing is something we all do, and we can’t always tell what the consequences will be. Even Amal with his brilliant insights into how human behaviour will make financial markets rise or fall, miscalculates the personal impact of an action of his, and the consequences on him.

And Hilary has experienced loss too. The pain of it never leaves her. It is a pain of love denied, but also of the ethical quandary into which she fell when she denied it. And now, again, love, or in some cases merely lust, surrounds her, in one instance leading to the next ethical dilemma, the one whose resolution closes the action of the play.

The closure works well, but it doesn’t close the debate. Stoppard knows better than that: he leaves the issues out there for us to consider. Would Amal’s problems have arisen in a purely thinking machine? Would Hilary’s? Is love an experience that a machine can feel, or suffer? Is ethical uncertainty?

On the way, Stoppard entertains us with his usual wit, though this is less a play of wit than some of his earlier ones – the underlying issues are too deep for that. But the wit helps bring them out.

He also indulges another predilection of his, for coincidence. Already in Night and Day, Dick Wagner tells us that “one of the things that makes novels less plausible than history, I find, is the way they shrink from coincidence.”

In telling the story of Hilary’s loss, Stoppard shrinks not at all from coincidence. And the way he handles it only makes the play more of a gem.

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stoppard's play grapples with "the hard problem" in current psychology: how can there be consciousness in a thoroughly material universe? If our brain is nothing but an organic computer, why does it experience itself as something else than a computer? Where, ultimately, does consciousness come from: something non-organic, or organic complexity?

I should have loved this play, I really should have, with such juicy questions at hand, and such a smart, witty author as Stoppard to play with them. Yet, when biology -- and particularly gender -- seems to play such a role in dividing proponents of the materialist and spiritualist schools of thought, it simply undoes the discussions that the characters are having, revealing them to be nothing more than convenient beliefs adopted for the sake of propping up the characters' fragile psyches. So, the materialist are all materialistic male assholes, and the spiritualist maudlin female altruists... Perhaps that's Stoppard's ultimate viewpoint here: that we're having these discussions not for themselves as much as for our selves, an interesting hypothesis that - along with its zippy language - rescues the play from total disaster for me. Still, an aggravating setup for a thin silver lining.

[Yasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really should read more plays ! Now obviously, rating it without having seen it is a bit unfair, there's a lot more to theater than just the text. But what I read is the text, so that's all I can comment on.

I think a good performance needs to leave a lot of space for it to breathe, because characters are just dropping their beliefs in full academic jargon (as irl academics do tbh) back and forth at each other. I'm trying to stop the gender wars so I'm not gonna call it a male thing but I wish the author did not make everyone's motivations/relationships wanting to sleep with each other/sleeping with each other. Everyone wants to fuck Hillary I guess, and Hillary just wants to prove that people are good in nature. Well, that's an unfairly simplistic take on the hard problem, which is both too on the nose and not acknowledged enough to my taste.

I'm really interested in texts exploring the rationality of religion, which I thought was rly well expressed (and probably the strongest point) here. Spike offers a weak counter argument, and I recognize a lot of the conversations I used to have with *********.

The nature/nurture theme is a bit wishy washy, I think it's woven in well enough with Cathy and Jerry's parallel phone conversations vs her essays, but it felt slightly thrown in there at the end.

Bo and Amal is another relationship I feel nothing about, though I like both characters a lot. Especially Amal's extreme rationality, which is framed as antithetical to altruism, introduces questions as to why he would publish the hedge fund's findings in a way that makes his character a bit more complex - cause I feel like a lot of these characters fall flat, and might need rly strong actors to bring them to life.

I never understand why a play might be picked by the National Theater. I know they're good: it's a good play. Like I said, I like the ideas it discusses and it does it well. Narratively, I do think it's unremarkable, so it might be a better read as an exercise in philosophy.

Alternatively, I could still be recoiling from the dinner scene, which left me frustrated and annoyed. There's no reason for it to be this tense, more specifically with respect to Julia and Ursula's relationship. Actually that's not true, this is the same tension that drives the rest of the story, so it makes sense for it to be there, but it just felt a bit cheap, especially when no one is presenting new arguments or talking points, and it feels like we might be going around in circles.

Also the outlier bullshit got in my nerves as someone who loves scientific integrity, I'm sorry Bo but what the fuck. Ugh.

That's all I'll say for now because I'm hungry and can't be bothered to write more, hopefully this is enough for me to remember this play, but since I didn't write anything about the actual debates they were having it probably won't.

[Guan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stoppard wittily discusses science, consciousness, the human condition etc but this wasn’t half as mind-blowing as Arcadia. Some questions raised and none answered, but I suppose there are no answers especially when it comes to consciousness and mind body duality..

But this was set in the present in a very familiar context so still a funny read.

[leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ooh, Tom Stoppard has such a smart voice. Structurally perhaps this play left a bit to be desired (maybe if it were a bit longer?), but the dialogue and characters were so wonderful. Good read! Would love to see a production.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was one of my favorites! I loved the debates over consciousness and the questions of chance happenings. A sweet play.

[Tom Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another taxing but enjoyable mental & verbal Stoppard exercise.

I’m very interested in the question of Human Consciousness, as is Stoppard, so I couldn’t resist this brief work. While the Hard Problem was well written and performed, I have to admit that listening to the usual Stoppard rapid-fire dialogue spoken by a number of characters of similar age and class made me long for a transcript to follow.

I still found it interesting. Four Stars ****

[James Klagge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to like Tom Stoppard more than I do. This was no different.
I was excited by this play b/c of the philosophical title. In philosophical and neurological circles "the hard problem" is how to account for consciousness in purely physical terms. Oddly, but interestingly, Stoppard uses the phrase to refer not only to that but also to the problem of accounting for altruism in a world of egoistic motivations, accounting for free will in a world of determinism, and accounting for God in a world of atheism. And those problems take up more attention in the play. They are all interesting and "hard." The interest of the play is more in the range of issues it addresses than in how it addresses them.

[Byron · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw a performance of this play and it was very disappointing. As far as I'm concerned, this play is unfinished and predicates itself on ideas that frankly require much longer in running time to adequately discuss and digest. It creates stereotypes of women and doesn't nearly go far enough into exploring the ideas about egoism, altruism and the mystery of human consciousness. It wraps up far too neatly and the characters are not sufficiently rendered for you to care about. For a man of Stoppard's stature, it is quite disappointing to come across a piece of his work that relies on contrivances and doesn't nearly spend sufficient time in delving into the nature of human consciousness. This is a case where Stoppard bit off more than he could chew and tried to encapsulate a "hard problem" in a little over 90 minutes and doesn't leave you feeling sated. Hard to believe that Cary Perloff, who has been director of ACT for more than 20 years somehow found this play to her liking. She blew it and should have found this play to be unfinished, requiring of additional rewrites. Shame on Stoppard for passing off a work that is unworthy of his reputation and makes crass generalizations of character types.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first play of Stoppard's I've genuinely liked since Arcadia, and it may very well be the best play he's ever written for women, as well as the most modern in general. The depiction of the tech world is fairly spot on, though Stoppard manages to make it as British as ever, which makes sense given the setting, but also kind of quaint if your tech point of reference is, say, Silicon Valley. The roles across the board are excellent, with a large and diverse cast that feels more human and accessible than is often the case with Stoppard's plays. It still occasionally gets bogged down by its own worthiness, big vocabulary, and interest in ideas over people, but since the ideas this time around are more closely connected to the human experience, the play feels surprisingly human even in its flights of intellectual fancy. A wry but touching social comedy that actually manages to give us a little bit of sweeping vista- which really is a miracle in the modern theater world that usually opts for small stories. The story is small, but Stoppard presents it in a big way that is nothing short of admirable. And for him, it's even rather short!

[Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Stoppard’s new play should have been the apogee of this development. The “hard problem” of the title is the problem of consciousness. Where is it? What is it? Crucially, is “the mind” the same as “the brain”? The joy of the play, his first for nine years, is that it brings this problem to the stage and poses it crisply." - Susannah Crisp, The Guardian

I'm uncertain as to how to review Tom Stoppard's play. I've heard of his other plays, most notably "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", but have not had the pleasure of seeing any in the theater. I thought I'd start by reading his latest. In Ms. Crisp's review she succinctly states what the "hard problem" is - is the mind and the brain the same (there was also talk about the brain and consciousness and altruism).

It was a thought provoking story of "are we inherently good and learn evil" or "are we inherently evil and control it by doing good deeds" and how coincidences occur in our life. If your looking for a great overview and review of The Hard Problem, there are many good ones online.

I am happy to have read it but admit that at times the discussion was above my cerebral calibration.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stoppard's been doing his homework, nine years of it since Rock 'n' Roll, and came up with a corker about consciousness, the eponymous problem. Proof comes with the little details, prisoners' dilemma and vampire bats, but what's hard to tell is if any answer the will satisfy the current curiosity over how the mind works. So instead Stoppard takes on a slew of red herrings: mind-body dualism, who is God and more-than-just coincidences. Hilary is an outspoken heroine while being horrible when it comes to providing sustinence: bad coffee, a botched dinner party, proper supervisory attention to a protégé's published paper. Will have to return to the play with an academic mindset, but I am somewhat relieved that I will not be working on the virtual staging of this play for my research project, not yet.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although heavy in conversation about evolutionary biology and materialism (which happens to interest me), this still manages to be a lively play. I can certainly see where this would leave someone cold, but it is not intended to be epic or particularly moving. It is an idea play.

I was fortunate to see the play performed, and they handled the philosophical sections very lightly – trippingly you might say. You didn’t have to dwell on every word and nuance to understand the discussion, so it was spoken speedily without a lot of over-emoting.

If the hard problem of consciousness, materialism and meaning interests you, this is a very good play. (Not great, but very good.) If you want more plot and passion, you might want to look elsewhere.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cringed throughout nearly this entire play. I was disappointed that the women were placed into such common scientific stereotypes... The women being the more "feeling, hopeful" types and the men being the "logical, rational" types. Certainly there's a reason why those stereotypes exist, but I wish authors didn't feel so pressured to follow them as so much of the population does not. I did like that Hilary spoke her mind, but wish the crying could have been reduced... I was quite impressed by the number of concepts that Stoppard managed to pull into a fairly short play. But the cringing didn't allow me to rate this one any higher.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, so this is the play The Hard Problem, by Tom Stoppard. I can't find anywhere I can see it here in Oregon, so I bought the "book" on Kindle and read it. Tom Stoppard is a fabulous playwright, I love his work. While reading this isn't quite at the same level as watching it, it's better than nothing!

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Stoppard's best work (it seemed to end rather abruptly), but it had me thinking about a lot of questions that fall on the boundaries between neuroscience and philosophy of mind. I wish I'd had a chance to see it, but reading was an okay substitute.

[Steve Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard wonderful places much fun to read as it was to see both on filming on stage. No word is wasted as characters fall in and out of love, wrestle with what it means to be good, and try to solve the "hard problem."

[Beth Hartnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading a play is, obviously, a very different experience than attending a play. I'm glad I picked up this play about a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, but the theater experience must have been much better than what I experienced.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

A new Stoppard play after nine years is obviously an event. But The Hard Problem is a hard play, and would obviously be clearer seen than read. I look forward to it coming to New York, and will certainly reread it (probably more than once) before it does.