Abstract
At the Royal National Theatre Platform Performance with Tom Stoppard on 6 February 2015, host Nicholas Hytner, then still director of the RNT, started the conversation by quoting from a letter Stoppard had sent Hytner in 2013. In the letter, Stoppard indicates that he wanted to combine writing about the banking crisis and the possibility of a person’s altruistic goodness in the context of evolutionary biology. The resulting play, › The Hard Problem‹ (2015) directed by Hytner at the Dorfman Theatre (World Premiere on 28 January 2015), was at the centre of that platform discussion, and is at the centre of this article. In the article we provide a detailed analysis of the play’s use of references to evolutionary biology and consciousness studies, and how these references relate to the characters, the plot, and the RNT production.
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