First, an instantaneous apology to The Royal Court for my false accusation below when I berated them for not listing the parts played by the support actors. I had looked to the pages containing their 'bios' to give me that information but, in fact, had I turned another page I would have found a cast list. Sorry, and now let's hear it for eight actors who were playing against three of the very best in the land and who, in quality, were right up there with them: Edward Hogg, Alice Eve, Miranda Colchester, Antony Calf, Peter Sullivan, Martin Chamberlain, Nicole Ansari and Louise Bangay.
A few posts down I was writing on the subject of Coriolanus and I suggested that it was one of the greatest political plays ever written with Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" running it close. A wild, if harmless, piece of hyperbole even by my extravagant standards but now, I think, "Rock 'n' Roll" (along with Stoppard's earlier "The Coast of Utopia") must join them. "The personal is political" claim the Marxists but in this play Stoppard, through his hero, Jan, refuses to accept the dictum. For him, the personal is just that, personal! Jan has no wish to change the world even if his world in the 1960s to '80s is regimented by Soviet tanks. All he wants is the freedom for his beloved rock bands to perform their songs. Even the fall of Dubcek fails to dent his insistence on a private, personal 'pursuit of happiness'. Husak, he claims, might be a Soviet puppet but he will be better than Dubcek because he will deflect the worst antics of the political apparatchiks. He argues with his friend Ferdinand who is a dissident activist, "You can't face life without a guarantee. So you convince yourself everything's going to end badly. But look - when the Russians invaded, you would have bet on mass arrests, the government in gaol, everything banned, reformers thrown out of their jobs, out of the universities, the whole Soviet thing, with accordion bands playing Beatles songs. I thought the same thing. I came back to save rock 'n' roll, and my mother actually. But none of it happened. My Mum's okay, and there's new bands ripping off Hendrix and Jethro Tull on equipment held together by spit. I was in the Music F Club where they had this amateur rock competition. The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from 'Velvet Undergorund', and I knew everything was basically okay."
Here, I will touch on a point that is not central to Stoppard's theme but which his sharp observation of all matters Czech has brought to his attention. The Czechs are the epitome of central Europeanism (if I may call it that). For centuries they have been subject to this or that 'regime', royal, imperial, Fascist and Soviet, all of which have come and gone and no doubt others will arrive. Through a personal connection I have enjoyed a slight insight into Moravian village life which, in comparison to the West, is a very unsophisticated society, but also an immensely enduring one! By and large people there are self-sufficient in the necessities of life and this 'independence' allows them the 'freedom' to keep well away from politics above the parish pump level. In the play, Jan is an educated version of this personal self-sufficiency and indifference, an attitude that chimes with Stoppard's own belief and desire that people should avoid the rigidities of political dogma and, instead, concentrate on the personal and the human. Here is Jan explaining it to his friend Ferdinand following an incident in which a rock musician has been arrested:
Ferd: I'll put it another way. Who's going to lay bare the ideological contradictions of bureaucratic dictatorship? Us intellectuals, or - ?
Jan: The Plastics [a rock band]. Why do you think you're walking around and Jirous [the band leader] is in gaol?
Ferd: Because he insulted a secret policeman.
Jan: No, because the policeman insulted him. About his hair. Jirous doesn't cut his hair. It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol. But what is the policeman angry about? What difference does long hair make? The policeman is angry about his fear. The policeman's fear is what makes him angry. He's frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn't care. He doesn't care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn't afraid of dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith ..."
Which is all well and good but, as Stoppard knows all too well from his personal experiences in Czechoslovakia at the time, sooner or later the 'politics gets personal'! In 1976 the regime jailed several Czech rock musicians for spreading anti-socialism in their songs and as a result the dissident movement produced 'Charter 77' accusing the government of failure to comply with the Helsinki Accords. In the play, Jan succumbs to the political by signing the 'Charter', following an attack on his 'personal', in the form of a police raid on his flat in which all his precious rock records are smashed.
As I indicated in the post below, the other activist in the play is Max, an English Philosophy don and a committed Marxist. He is, I suppose, Stoppard's means of demonstrating how ideology that forgets the human is eventually self-destructive. Despite Stalin, despite Hungary in '56 and despite Czechoslovakia in '68, Max refuses to leave the party that stands for everything in which he believes: "To be human is to be joined together. Society! When the revolution was young and I was young, we were all made from a single piece of timber. The struggle was for socialism through organised labour, and that was that. It wasn't revolution in the head, or revolution by an alliance of single-issue groups. What remains of those bright days of certainty? The Trotskyites squabble over their place at the front of the march without noticing there's no one behind. The New Left is an ivory ghetto where the defeat of capitalism is supposed to follow from correct analysis. Where do I belong? The Party is losing confidence in its creed. If capitalism can be destroyed by anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice and every special interest already covered by the Social Democrats, is there a lot of point in being communist? [...]" The eventual loss of Max's communist faith is matched by his loss of belief in materialism. His bold assertion that mind is as material as the body is smashed by his dying wife's assertion that her surgically amputated body is nothing without her mind and in his anguish he is forced to admit that he loves her with his immaterial soul. Max is a great creation by Stoppard and even as one disagrees vehemently with his politics one is moved to pity by the intellectual and personal journey he goes through before his eyes are opened.
Obviously from the title you can judge that Stoppard uses the 1960s revolution in rock 'n' roll as a central motif in this play and thereby touches on an extremely pertinent and contemporary point. For some time now I have wondered, in the 'War on Terror', or to be precise, the war between militant Islam and the West, whether their semtex will blow us up before our corruption poisons them! By which I mean that in this world of instantaneous and global communication, the glittering, gaudy, bawdy ways of the West are constantly dangled before orthodox eyes as an affront to Allah, no doubt, but as a temptation to the faithful, as well. As Max ruefully admits during a visit to Prague in the '70s during which he meets several apparatchiks in the Sovietised government, he is probably the first communist they have ever met!
However, perhaps Stoppard's most poignant motif that is touched upon obliquely throughout the play is the life and times of a certain Syd Barrett, a gentleman hitherto unknown to me, but apparently a leading light in the group, Pink Floyd, when it first started but whose drug-binges, verging on the 'heroic', led to his dismissal. He ended up living with his mum back in Cambridge. We meet him first at the very beginning of the play as long-haired, young man, crouching on his heels atop a garden wall softly serenading a young girl with a single-reed pipe, who, in her dreamy state imagines him to be Pan; perhaps, in Stoppard's metaphor, the first, wild rocker of mythical history! Later the girl, now grown up, sees him again, this time as a fat, bald man on a bicycle. Stoppard, I think, shares Shakespeare's fascination with Time and its ravages.
I hope I haven't made this brilliant play sound like a dire political tract. It is anything but that, and the personal lives and loves are drawn with great tenderness and wit. Before I finish, I cannot resist the temptation to repeat a passage that could stand forever as an example of Stoppard at his very best. A security service's interrogator is questioning Jan on his return to Prague in the course of which he says, "We're supposed to know what's going on inside people. That's why it's the Ministry of the Interior." Please, please, go and see it, it is everything that drama should be.
Thanks for the thoughtful review. Your comments on characters and ideologies portrayed in the play are very revealing. However, while watching the play, I felt like I missed a lot because I am not familiar with the Rock 'n' Roll movement nearly as well as Stoppard is. That being said, since you haven't heard of Syd Barret before seeing the play, it might be the case that there was an important cultural detail you did not catch. I certainly feel I did not.
Eugene
Posted by: Eugene | Thursday, 07 February 2008 at 05:40
Eugene, on the contrary, thank *you* for nudging me into re-reading my review and thus bringing back happy memories of a theatrical experience I will never forget. I would be fascinated to know where and when you saw the play. I'm curious because just in the last few days I have noticed quite a number of 'hits' on my blog looking for "Rock 'n' Roll".
As for the rock 'n' roll movement, alas, it all passed me by. For me, popular music ended with Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Ella - so that gives you a clue as to my age! However, I do see Stoppard's point that this wild and undisciplined 'music' was anathema to disciplined regimes particularly as it is aimed directly at their young - and young at heart.
I am a huge fan of Tom Stoppard and I have been lucky enough to direct three of his plays - strictly amateur productions, I should add. Perhaps you would like to write your own review of the production you saw. You do not indicate that you have a blog of your own so I would be happy to print it here. I guess you are American and I would be interested in an American re-action to what is a very European play. Let me know.
Posted by: David Duff | Thursday, 07 February 2008 at 09:51