Tom Stoppard's long awaited latest play marks the last production that Nicholas Hytner will direct at the National before standing down as surely the most successful artistic director in the institution's half-century of existence. And although this column never highlights the mere, often irrelevant, fact of someone's Jewishness, in this newspaper it might seem somehow negligent not to note that on this significant night, the people behind this play, this production and even this stage, which has been rebuilt and renamed after the philanthropist who paid for it, are all, well, Jewish.

I suspect audiences will be split between those who praise or blame them for this evening of dense, intense dialogue. Stoppard has an unfair reputation for stimulating the mind more than the heart. But in this case it is the mind that his protagonists seek to define. Most of them work at a brain science institute privately funded by a billionaire. The purpose of this place is to explain consciousness, a problem which has so confounded scientists and philosophers that they have a special name for it, which is where Stoppard got the title for his play.

The author's heroine is Hilary, played by a fizzing Olivia Vinall. She's a 20-something psychology researcher who juggles two seemingly irreconcilable belief systems – God and rationalism. She and Stoppard's other protagonists debate the difference between calculating and thinking; between brains and computers and whether the mind, like the brain, is purely the result of physical things such as atoms and molecules, or something yet more elusive and complex.

This is not a show to pull in the Mamma Mia crowd. And while the ideas expressed here are often thrillingly articulated, there are moments when our grip on the nature of consciousness slips, as does consciousness itself at times. Yet you'd be mad to miss out on the exhilarating wit with which Stoppard explores his themes.