Yet his play is not really about consciousness. I know this for I purposely went in raw to the auditorium, not allowing myself to peek at the playscript: each step of the argument was intelligible. Stoppard puts the problem with exemplary clarity. How do you tell the brain from the mind? It is a question that echoes Yeats: how can you tell the dancer from the dance? Or, to some extent, the player from the play? Yet the theatre is in many ways an ideal arena in which to incarnate the problem of consciousness. The great adventurer looks strangely conventional. Often taxed with being too intellectual as a playwright, he is here not intellectually stringent enough. The difficulty is that Stoppard then glides away from examining it. 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. The “hard problem” of the title is the problem of consciousness. Stoppard’s new play should have been the apogee of this development.
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