LONDON — The beautiful young couple, hair mussed and eyes glazed, has just had a tumble in the sheets. It has clearly been a fulfilling encounter for both parties. Yet something unspoken still hovers between them.
So the woman, wearing a black satin teddy, turns to the man, who’s wrapped himself in her negligee, and asks him to go ahead and do it, again and again. ‘‘Explain consciousness,’’ she demands.
Ah, there’s nothing like pillow talk, Tom Stoppard-style.
This conversation occurs in the hard-thinking ‘‘The Hard Problem,’’ the new play by Mr. Stoppard that opened on Wednesday night at the National Theater. The exchange, between a university psychology student and her tutor, heats up to embrace issues like ‘‘Nature-Nurture Convergence in Egoistic-and-Altruistic Parent-Offspring Behavior.’’
There’s also much talk of genetics and survival reflexes, with names like Mendel, Darwin, Crick and Watson and (the wild card in the pack) Raphael dropped along the way. It’s all enough to make the young woman, Hilary (Olivia Vinall), who longs to believe that people are more than their biological components, put a wastebasket over her head.
This unexpected sartorial choice makes for a silly, slightly surreal image, but it has a practical purpose: Hilary doesn’t want her tutor and lover, Spike (Damien Molony), to see her cry. On the play’s opening night, that basket felt to me like a sign of deliverance.
We were already well into the second scene of ‘‘The Hard Problem.’’ And the tears-concealing wastebasket registered as both a welcome idiosyncrasy and a necessary gesture of assurance. It betokened, I hoped, that Mr. Stoppard’s latest full-length play, his first in nine years, would be more than a cosmetically enhanced debate on subjects that have long concerned him. The evidence so far had not been positive.
Now let’s jump ahead five years and a few scenes to another bed, this one in Venice. That’s where Spike and Hilary, now working at a research institute funded by an American hedge-fund billionaire (Anthony Calf), have been reunited at an academic conference. There’s a certain amount of the requisite catching-up banter.
But basically they’re still having the same conversation, about whether matter can be separated from consciousness. (That’s the ‘‘hard problem’’ of the title.) And they don’t seem to have advanced at all from their previous positions. At that moment, I yearned for my own personal wastebasket, which I could quietly slide over my head.
It’s not that ‘‘The Hard Problem’’ — which is crisply directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National’s departing artistic director — is a dull or clumsy play. There are more than flickers of the lightning wit and intellectual energy you associate with Mr. Stoppard.
But it’s the first work I have known from this ever-questing dramatist in which the ideas overwhelm the characters. It’s as if the play suffers from its own mind-body dichotomy, in which the figures onstage exist to illustrate, rather than embody, talking points. This feeling is enhanced by the fact that Bob Crowley’s set is dominated by an abstract neurological model of the brain, which hovers over a minimally furnished stage.
Mr. Stoppard’s characters have always seemed to possess more restless gray matter than those of any other contemporary playwright. But his characters’ thoughts have always been palpably propelled by their passions, whether they’re futurist philosophers (‘‘Jumpers’’), Russian revolutionaries (‘‘The Coast of Utopia’’), Czech dissidents (‘‘ Rock ‘n’ Roll,’’ his last major work to date) or even overly clever playwrights (‘‘The Real Thing,’’ recently given a tepid Broadway revival.)
You feel the throb of their need for certainty and order in a murky and chaotic universe, for evidence of an independent will that seeks transcendence. Clearly, Mr. Stoppard intends for Hilary, who keeps trying to work God into her scientific equations, to be animated by a similar visceral hunger for belief, as she navigates her way through a world driven by professional sabotage and filthy money. (The manipulation of the stock market, by the way, figures in a subplot.)
Her pet research project — trying to prove that altruism is more than a conditioned survival instinct — has its own personal causes. Spoiler alert (though a minor one, since this revelation comes early): Hilary gave up a baby daughter for adoption when she was 15, and has wondered ever since about what happened to her.
This all-informing secret from her past is uncharacteristically tidy for Mr. Stoppard, carrying the musky, musty scent of 19th-century melodramas. And Ms. Vinall has too tidy a presence here to give the role the defining, humanizing messiness it cries out for.
A rising star at the National, this 25-year-old actress has already appeared to fine advantage as two Shakespearean embodiments of goodness: Desdemona in ‘‘Othello’’ and Cordelia in ‘‘King Lear.’’ She’s a pristine gamine, with a seductive poise that brings to mind Audrey Hepburn crossed with Julie Andrews.
You can see why she was chosen to be the avatar for the case for altruism. But even on the rare occasions when Hilary acts on her competitive Darwinian instincts, in furthering her career or felling an academic rival, she remains untarnishable. She’s the character we are meant to root for. But it is difficult when her arguments and research methods come across as iffy. And you start to wonder why she was hired at that research institute in the first place.
Well, perhaps it’s because everyone is at least a little in love with her. That includes her boss (Jonathan Coy) and her eager-to-please mentee (Vera Chok). And love leads to erratic behavior, though, of course, that may just be an instance of confused reproductive urges.
Mr. Stoppard is, as always, an adept craftsman. He manages to make the results of an academic survey, and the ways in which it is skewed, a persuasive and even mildly suspenseful plot point. But the integration of his characters’ rational intellectual positions and irrational personalities is less fluid than usual.
Nonetheless, you can’t deny that Mr. Stoppard has provided food for thought, and not just a tasting menu but a full, footnoted banquet. Who else these days writes plays that warrant programs containing samples of the author’s correspondence with eminent minds like Richard Dawkins and the developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi?
If I was never entirely convinced of the pain and passion of the characters here, I had no doubt about the enduring, adventurous enthusiasm for the imponderables of human existence that continues to propel their creator. And I do mean Mr. Stoppard, not God. After seeing ‘‘The Hard Problem,’’ one feels such distinctions are necessary.
“The Hard Problem” is at the National Theater, London, through May 27; nationaltheatre.org.uk.