Writer: David Lodge
Adapter and Director: Paloma Jacob-Duvernet
David Lodge’s erudite and philosophical play gets an update by StoneCrabs Theatre Company and now plays at the Omnibus’s AI Festival. Rich with ideas, Secret Thoughts does occasionally lack drama, but its debates on the nature of consciousness are nothing short of thrilling.
Novelist Helen has just started working at a university that was once called a New University in the 1960s. In 2018, the campus looks rather tired apart from the new shiny Institute of Cognitive Science. Mourning the recent death of her husband, Helen isn’t too excited about teaching her students how to write a novel. Indeed, she despairs of her students’ efforts thinking they will only add to the increasingly meaningless fiction mountain.
Things pick up for her when she meets Messenger, a popular lecturer at the Institute. They discuss the nature of consciousness. He believes it to be a fiction; nothing more than electrons and neutrons. She disagrees, refusing to yield to the idea that the self does not exist. If Messenger and his colleagues can make a machine with consciousness does that mean this self-awareness of humans is somehow artificial?
At first, Helen thinks it’s a pointless exercise, but comes to see that a novelist acts in the same way as one of these scientists, creating consciousness if not for machines, but for characters that fill the pages of a book. The copuple’s debates are fascinating, tackling the ideas of Nietzsche, William James and Darwin. Messenger is full of himself but still thinks that the self is an illusion.
The fact that the two embark on an affair is a plot strand that Lodge’s original play – based on his book Thinks… – makes more of than this version adapted by Paloma Jacob-Duvernet. Here, the old rivalry between art and science is the focus. Emma Wilkinson Wright and El Anthony are excellent as the warring lovers but seem very awkward in the unnecessary movement sections which punctuate the scenes.
The play is short – it lasts around 50 minutes – but the end isn’t quite right yet. It needs a different kind of finish as the current one falls a little flat, especially taking into account all the ardent sparring that has gone before.
Runs until 9 July 2023
