PROMPT CORNER 03/2015:
The Hard Problem
National Theatre (Dorfman), London SE1
Opened 28 January, 2015

Both Janet Suzman and Patricia Hodge explicitly consider literary knowledge as the (only) kind of knowledge that counts in a theatre audience.

Canard

For Suzman, the (alleged) fact that “People don’t understand literary and historical references any more” is proof that they are “not as well-educated”, or at least not as widely.  Hodge is even more parochial, bemoaning specifically that “they’re not being cultivated into the language [of theatre] in the way that we once were”… note also the implicit presence there of the old canard that “the kind of education I received in my childhood was the kind that everybody should receive now”.

It seems to me that these ladies are right in the narrowest sense – succeeding generations have indeed less of a foundation in literary reference – and staggeringly wrong in the wider view – in other words, that situation in no way means that the totality of younger people’s learning is less.  Surely over the last century, perhaps the last two, it has become ever harder to operate within a developed society without an ever broader knowledge base.  Could Suzman or Hodge say what SMS stands for, swap out a hard disk in a computer, or know the difference between Tony Hawks and Tony Hawk?  (Hawks is a comedian and television personality, Hawk a skateboarding guru).  Are those skills and references less “important” because they have less sanction from high culture?  It’s a circular, authoritarian argument: “This is more important because a culture that values such things says it is.”

Lamenting

But not knowing is one thing; not caring is quite another.  Michael Billington is quite right, in an article online at http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/09/tom-stoppard-audiences-references-hard-problem, to ask simply, “Does it matter?”  This particular ball was set rolling by Tom Stoppard lamenting that audiences now don’t get his gag in Travesties about Goneril.  Yet as Billington observes, it’s a gag that requires no more recondite knowledge or inference than that Goneril is (a) a character in a play and (b) female – hardly the kind of taxing stuff which Stoppard should be aggrandising himself for having written.

However, in another online discussion on the topic (unfortunately I can’t track it down right now to provide a link) I’ve seen someone who considers themselves a committed theatremaker, not just -goer, declare defiantly, “We don’t need to know Shakespeare”.  Now, I’m not going to take the reactionary position that this is blasphemy, but for a theatremaker to deem the (by common consent) greatest dramatist in history superfluous does strike me as, shall we say, a somewhat sub-optimal approach.

Useless

There are some things that seem reasonable to consider beyond us.  Another Stoppard example cited by Michael is the question in The Hard Problem, “Could the cosmos be teleological?”  Now, I’ve remarked before on what an unashamed intellectual snob I am, and even if I’d routinely remembered what teleology means, rather than looking it up again when I got home, I would have found that question so abstruse and vague as to be meaningless and thus useless both intellectually and, even more so, dramatically.

I’m also much less inclined to take Stoppard’s word about his own intellectual prowess since I found it so easy to take apart his arguments – or rather, his assumptions – in Rock ’n’ Roll.  It seems to me that The Hard Problem exhibits the same flaws only in a more rarefied field of reference.  As I suggested last issue, within the first couple of minutes of the play, he has claimed that the optimum approach in the “prisoner’s dilemma” is the diametrical opposite of what game theorists in fact recognise as the most beneficial one.  (I learned this from David Edgar’s 2001 play called simply The Prisoner’s Dilemma.)  This fallacy is the first indication that the play is not an investigation, but – like Rock ’n’ Roll – an ex cathedra justification of a particular political/moral perspective.  The whole play proceeds from the attitude that if people don’t agree with the authorial view, it must be because they don’t understand it, and if they don’t understand it, it must be because they’re ignorant; the possibility that even a smidgen of responsibility might be located in the vicinity of Stoppard is literally inconceivable.  And that can be the most pernicious kind of ignorance of them all.

Written for Theatre Record.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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