For a birthday present, no problem with this hard problem

It was my birthday back in January, but theatre tickets to popular plays are notoriously hard to book. It was my wife’s birthday in late April, much closer to today. And it’s my youngest son’s birthday in a couple of months’ time.

The upshot of all this was that a pair of longstanding friends of ours, one of whom is also godfather (a lay godfather, I should stress) to my son, decided to mark those three birthdays by taking us all to the National Theatre in London last Saturday. It was an inspired gift, particularly as the play they chose was Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem.

Stoppard is one of the finest English-language playwrights of our time. It’s nearly ten years since he last wrote a play, but now he’s come up with another classic.

Tom Stoppard has crafted another outstanding play

There was a time when he used to write plays that were brilliantly witty, crackling from start to finish with clever interplays of ideas and characters that were larger than life, to the point of being caricatures: think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or The Real Inspector Hound.

But he was also concerned with matters of political justice, of human rights, and came up with powerful denunciations of authoritarianism in all its Machiavellian slyness (Professional Foul) or the corruption of dictators (Night and Day). These were still plays of ideas, but the characters were more rounded and more human.

Then came a play like Arcadia which was nothing short of searing. The ideas are still vital, but the tragedy of a young girl and a young love gives the tale a poignancy that adds a dimension beyond the cerebral.

Now we have The Hard Problem. And humanity is on full display. Nine characters intertwine through love, or at least lust, through hierarchy, between superiors and subordinates or between tutors and students, or through differing outlooks. The “hard problem” is the issue of mind and matter: in a universe, increasingly viewed by many as containing only matter, what can produce thought?

Alan Turing, in his notion of the “imitation game”, suggested that if a machine appears to be thinking, then we must assume it is thinking. In this view, we’d have to say that we build simple thinking machines, made of electronic components, whereas we are ourselves much more complex thinking machines, made of organic matter. The difference is one of sophistication, and power, but not one of essential kind: machines are machines.

There is a reference to the ideas explored by Turing who, specifically, built chess-playing machines.

Leo Computers compute. Brains think. Is the machine thinking?

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.

But the central character, Hilary, sees thing differently.

Hilary: 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 it sitting there like a toaster? It’s sitting there like a toaster.

Leo So, what would be your idea of deep?

Hilary A computer that minds losing.

It’s vintage Stoppard, challenging received notions, proposing another point of view, and doing it with sparkling humour. But it never concludes, never tries to force us down a particular avenue. Our group sat spellbound for 100 minutes (with no interval), though to us they felt like 30, and came out moved and thoughtful – nothing like a toaster.

Moved, incidentally, because though the ideas are vital, they aren’t the only hard problem. Hilary has her own: a child to whom she gave birth at 15 and who was taken from her, given up for adoption, immediately. A child she tries to keep in touch with through prayer. And then there’s the linked problem of coincidence, if there are coincidences, and how does one handle them well, with delicacy and love, even when they have to be directed to a man whose existence seems devoid of either?

There’s plenty of Arcadia here and not just Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Sometimes explicitly:

Leo Why? Why are you wasting my time with this fan dance? Are you in love with her?

Hilary She’s in love with me.

Leo (taken aback) Well! Finally, something I understand.

The Hard Problem:
Hilary (Olivia Vinall) confronts Leo (Jonathan Coy)

Always, and pervasively, we have that Stoppard wit to keep us amused as well as stimulated and affected. One of my favourites came when Amal, the hedge fund manager, talked about “watching the market bet on water flowing uphill and flying pigs farting Chanel No. 5.” That struck me as smartly summing up the behaviour of financial markets at their rational best.

An excellent play. Well worth seeing. So a fine birthday present.

Joyless Jews, a victim and his torturer, breaking codes

The Israelis are extraordinarily good at making films that shine a flashlight into the corners of their existence. Prisoners of War (Hatufim) is several leagues better than the rather pedestrian Homeland that was based on it (the latter only relieved by Claire Danes’ performance as a CIA agent with mental health problems – but doesn’t even that begin to wear thin after the novelty’s gone?). 

As for Waltz with Bashir, it’s hard to imagine an enemy of Israel making such a searing indictment of the horror and shame of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon – and it also shows just how good animation can be if one only allows it to take on a profound and adult subject.

Now a film by an Israeli director, Rama Burshstein, has opened my eyes again, with Fill the Void. Burshstein is the first Orthodox Jew to have made a film for general distribution, and she’s merciless in the way she probes the life of an Orthodox (Haredi) community in Tel Aviv. What emerges is a harrowing picture, at least to the eyes of this Western outsider, of claustrophobia and denial of anything remotely resembling freedom of choice, above all to women. The community should naturally have the right to live its life as it wishes, but this sensitive film left me feeling “sooner you than me.”

Fill the void: powerfully grim and claustrophobic

Talking about merciless, the Railway Man, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, seems at first to be just another study of the pitiless treatment of prisoners of war by their Japanese captors, on the Burma railway in the Second World War (you’ll remember, The Bridge of the River Kwai, and if you don’t, make a point of watching it, or watching it again, soon. It’s a classic.) It works on two time planes: the adult Eric Lomax, the Railway Man of the title, back in his native Scotland and obsessively interested in railways still, partly as a means of dealing with the effects of his wartime sufferings, and his younger incarnation, taken prisoner in Singapore and then brutalised by his captors. 

It’s no spoiler to tell you he survived: the film starts with his post-war existence.

Colin Firth as the Railway Man, appropriately in a train

The scenes of his later life are in many ways more interesting than those from Burma, since they give an insight into the effects of post traumatic stress, not just on him, but on his fellow survivors. The film is based on the real-life Lomax’s autobiography, and it isn’t strong on self-criticism, which makes the material on his courage under torture slightly less easy to take at face value. Nonetheless, the film takes a fascinating turn from the point that Lomax discovers that one of his tormentors is alive and atoning for his sins by acting as a tour guide back at the camp where torture had occurred, making the last part of the film more than good enough to justify sitting through the POW scenes that lead up to it.

And then there’s Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game.

Not enough has yet been said about Alan Turing. We tend to talk most about the work he did breaking the German Enigma code during World War Two. What we perhaps don’t appreciate enough is that the principles on which he based the machines which he built to crack the cypher formed the basis of computing as we now know it. As well as contributing to saving the world from potential Nazi domination, he therefore prepared it for the culture we now enjoy. And before you say “well, there’s not much to be thankful there then,” just remember that an awful lot of computing is highly beneficial, and the fact that the Tea Party or, indeed, the US Republicans generally, can make use of the internet for their own nefarious ends, is just the price we pay for a great enhancement to our lives generally.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing
with one of the machines that broke Enigma and launched modern computing

The other code that Turing broke was society’s rejection of homosexuality that had, in his time, barely begun to recede. It wasn’t until a great reforming Labour government came to power in Britain in the 1960s, that the law against homosexuality was repealed. Too late for Turing, who fell foul of that law viciously applied by men who couldn’t begin to appreciate the quality of his genius. The experience destroyed him.

Not the least quality of the film is its portrayal of one of the policemen and his gradually awakening horror at what he has, for initially completely different motives, found himself dragged into forwarding.

Good films, all three. Perhaps not out-and-out classics, but well worth a couple of hours or so. And, if you have a couple of hours to watch any of them, you’d be unlikely to find you’ve wasted your time.