Brno brainer
It's
been a long time coming but finally a new play by Tom Stoppard
has arrived here. Since Arcadia (1993), the plays Indian
Ink (1995) and The Invention of Love (1997), an
adaptation of The Seagull (1997) and a trilogy The
Coast of Utopia (2002) seem to have passed without interest.
Rock 'N' Roll, on the other hand was greeted with the
enthusiasm of his best work from the 1970s and 1980s. In this
current production it feels like a very loose piece of writing
indeed.
The one comment I overheard most in the general
audience chatter at the [Melbourne] opening night (after “I
don’t know anything about the politics in this play")
was “I didn’t know Stoppard was Czech.” Although
Stoppard insists that “the whole Czech thing about me has
got wildly out of hand," according to a 1988 interview. “I
wasn't two years old when I left the country and I was back one
week in 1977, " he continues, "I went to an English
school and was brought up English. So I don’t feel Czech.”
All the same, Stoppard was born there in 1937 but then forced
in exile by the European war; unfortunately to Singapore where
the war in the Pacific then forced his family apart (his mother
took the children to India while Stoppard’s father remained
in Singapore where he died a prisoner or war). His mother remarried
to a British Army officer, one Major Stoppard, who took his new
family back to England after the war. So two year-old Tom began
a new life as an Englishman, experiencing at first Englishness
at one remove in the colonies and then, after 1946, England at
first hand.
Stoppard became, like another non-British Brit.
T. S. Eliot, more English than the English mastering the art of
British comedy and writing comedies as good as any English author
or the Irish branch including Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw. His breakthrough
play was even an adaptation of England’s greatest single
literary product. With all this in mind, the trauma of leaving
his birthplace in such a way must have stayed with him so that
when it was invaded a second time in the 1960s it must have triggered
something inside him. Recently he has mellowed as a playwright.
Kenneth Tynan reported that giving a lecture on ‘The Language
of Theatre’ Stoppard opened by saying that he would not
discuss the language of theatre, adding that “that was just
a device to attract a better class of audience.” Perhaps
he has also abandoned his defensive 'theatre of language'. The
cross-fertilization of unrelated themes and ideas that were the
motors of his earlier plays are less evident in Rock ‘N’
Roll giving way almost to sentiment. In The Native State (1991),
for example, he evoked India, where he had lived for the longest
before arriving in England. Rock ‘N’ Roll (2006),
even though written forty years after the initial events is a
reaction and, to me at least after seeing this production, an
act of nostalgia, the author yearning for, or rather imagining
the youth he never had as an heroic intellectual pitting it out
against the occupying Soviets. The play may be about rock music
but it is so mellow and nostalgic it might be Smetana’s
Moldau that Stoppard is really hearing.
His hero Jan (Matthew Newton) is like Rosencrantz
or Guildenstern occupying his time within a pre-existing and pre-ordained
certainty with his private jokes and obsessions (in this case
rock music) until that certainty eventually comes along. With
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern it was their deaths preordained by
the plot of Hamlet. In Rock ‘N’ Roll
it is the remarkably un-violent Velvet Revolution but what happens
along the way to Jan is fairly insubstantial. He is interrogated
by the most nonthreatening secret policeman (the stoppardianisms
in that scene never got beyond him being taunted to eat a biscuit
- unless a Czech being forced to eat a German pfeffernussen is
a form of nationalistic torture?). That we eventually learn Jan
was saved from the full wrath of the authorities by a bit of espionage
on the part of his old Cambridge professor explains why nothing
much happens to him while he and the audience wait for the bloodless
revolution.
Approaching the play as one would normally with
Stoppard you look for the ‘way in’, as it were, to
see if it operates on multiple levels of meaning and the elaborately
set up plot devices of old. A far as playing with time and place
it alternates between Cambridge and Prague and unfolds temporally
not, as was the case in Arcadia, switching backwards
and forwards in time. About twenty minutes or so in the scene
changes to the home of Cambridge professor Max (William Zappa)
and we see his wife Eleanor (Genevieve Picot), a scholar of the
Greek poet Sappho, tutoring a gauche student. As they discuss
Sappho's use of language Eleanor corrects the student's translation
of a word to a new meaning elaborating on the multiple interpretations
of the word and its modern use as 'machine'. I though 'aha!' this
will somehow be an allegory of the Russian invasion, tanks an
all that, or even that Sappho too was forced into exile by civil
strife. Surprisingly for such a skilled play maker a seemingly
inexpert logjam of Eleanor's back story ensued. Within minutes
we had hurled at us that Eleanor has cancer, a mastectomy and
other invasive surgical interventions and that her relationship
with Max is in worse shape than she is. Out of this clumsy Czech-list
(sorry I couldn't resist) of facts, however, came an extraordinarily
powerful and confronting speech about her physical and existential
pain that made one flinch. It was magnificent stuff and highly
un-stoppardian. But for such a long play to develop such an integral
character in 90 seconds and then give her only one more scene
is a dramatic loss. The Sapphic interpretations of the social
order died along with her too. Eleanor is the plays 'rockin' role
(sorry, but if Stoppard isn't go to make the puns someone will
have to) but is less the traditional Stoppard heroine (which was
more a talky cipher like a Shavian heroine). She is very much
a product of a more emotionally fueled later style (in his many
screenplays of the 1990s he delivered, however reluctantly, the
required central love stories and emotional dimensions to characters
not apparent in his stage works, along with his more usual asexual
wittiness). Given more stage time Eleanor could, and should have,
been a more dominant presence and present a better opportunity
for actor playing her. If anyone is play to Eleanor, however,
it is Picot. She is the one actor who, for me, created something
on stage that defies logic but remains unforgettable. In Summer
of the Seventeenth Doll when Barney proposes marriage to Olive,
Picot halted time and held it for what seemed an eternity, the
only sound heard was of Olive’s heart breaking as the illusion
she had clung to over the seventeen years fell away. Instead Stoppard
has the actor playing Eleanor return in the second act to play
her own daughter Esme. Esme, a 1960's dropout is everything her
mother is not; she has no academic potential and is enough of
a stoner to have a vision of the god Pan in her back garden. Pan
turns out to be the even bigger stoner Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd
fame, another not wholly integrated fragment of the plays mosaic.
Rock ‘N’ Roll covers Czech
history over twenty-two years from the 'Prague Spring' of Russian
occupation in 1968 to their withdrawal Vaclav Havel's elevation
from dissident to president. At the heart of the play is yet another
study of the relations between art and politics. This time it
is the pop music as weapon. Along the way pop music is discussed
as whether or not it has any value as art capable of conveying
a message, how much of a personal and popular message it can actually
convey or if it is just another commodity in a Capitalist society.
rather surprisingly the play ends with The Rolling Stones' appearance
in Prague in 1990, touting it as more significant than fall of
Communism. The play ends with Czechoslovakia gaining its freedom,
Jan meeting Max again, Soviet Communism breathing it's last gasp
and, to Max's enduring annoyance, Capitalism adapting further
still so that you can order novelty socks with hammer and sickle
logos from Socialist Weekly . Then the ultimate symbol of bourgeois
decadence takes place, a dinner party - more stultifying than
any 10 hour speech Fidel Castro ever made - and, worse still,
the reigning authority on Sappho is the gauche student, now a
professor in her own right and painted by Stoppard as a relic
of hippie feminism and played that way with relish by Melinda
Butel. Esme, meanwhile is struggling with her 'A' level Sappho
intending to become a tour guide for Lesbian cruises (that's tours
to the island of Lesbos where Sappho lived, not a speculation
about an all female passenger list). The second act, particularly
the scenes leading up to and including the dinner party, feels
like a modern day Bernard Shaw play.
The central characters should be Jan, the Czech
studying at Cambridge who returns home to confound the authorities,
and Max a professor and card carrying communist. Max is old school
Marxist practicing his beliefs in a vacuum. He rants his intolerance
of new generation socialists when one, his granddaughter’s
boyfriend Stephen (Grant Cartwright), tells him ‘Capitalism
doesn't go away, it just adapts’ unaware that Stephen represents
just how much Communism can and has adapted itself. The Eastern
Bloc presented in Simon Phillip’s production is as nonthreatening
a bunch as any authority figure in Stoppard’s earlier work.
The re-creation of a totalitarian state is as bogus as last year's
staging of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman. The secret police
are biscuit wielding ‘Inspector Hounds’.
The loose threads hang everywhere. Max's spy work
to save Jan, for example, is left untouched. Why is Max so unconcerned
about his spying for the Soviets apart from it would be impossible
to go off on another tangent so late in the play. Rock music is
supposed to pivotal in this play but here it seems like Stoppard's
new ‘device to attract a better class of audience’
(or one that needs a sweetener to swallow the obscure political
pill). Songs by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones waft in and
out between the scenes. The notorious underground Czech band The
Plastic People of the Universe is constantly evoked by Jan as
a bigger force in bringing on the Velvet Revolution that Havel
and the real protesters. Even the set, exposed lighting rigs and
banks of loudspeakers making the stage look in readiness for rock
concert implies that one was expected but a 180 minute play takes
place instead.
The set takes advantage of the full height of the
Playhouse stage for once. The top half given over to a screen,
on which the rooftops of Prague were projected, carefully photographed
in black and white in keeping with the tightly restricted blacks
and whites of the set. Perched high above the actors they created
a wonderful vertical space usually overlooked in this theatre.
Newsreels styled images were projected in between scenes of the
political events (that most of the audience had no clue about
anyway). The only sense of time in this production, however, was
a feeling that three hours of it is required from start to finish.
Michael Magnusson
To read more of Michael Mangusson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
On Stage (and walls) Melbourne.
