Rock 'N' Roll
Rock’n’Roll, Sydney Theatre, April 14-May 17, 2008; (approximately: 2.50 minutes, including 20 minute interval); ph: (61 2) 9250 1777 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au Photos by Jeff Busby.
At 70 and with his newest play, Rock’n’Roll, Tom Stoppard – Sir Tom these days – seems to be looking back and wondering: “what if …?” which makes him rather more ordinarily human than usual. And, given that his “what if?” spans that part of the 20th century blessed with the best soundtrack of all time, it also makes for an entertainment which is both human and not remotely ordinary.
Nevertheless, don’t go expecting a rock musical lest disappointment or bewilderment fatally distract you from what’s really going on. Rock’n’Roll is a title that could trap the unwary because it's about placing the music in its various historical contexts rather than the music per se. So, in a society such as the Swinging 60s UK, for instance, it enlivened otherwise dully polite lives but didn’t really matter. In Soviet bloc countries of the same era it was a very different record collection.
Then, Western rock music carried connotations beyond the comprehension of your average Kings Road dolly bird; or even Jagger and Lennon – whose youthful three-and-a-half-minute classics were actually less political than a Mary Quant mini. In Rock’n’Roll, therefore, snatches of this “socially negative music” (Soviet-speak) along with grainy black and white news footage, are used to book-end, punctuate and deliver subliminal sign postings in ways that I suspect may only be truly apparent to those who experienced those turbulent, amazing years, or – even rarer – are historians of the period.
At the Sydney opening night, for instance, a friend said grumpily: “In the news footage Gough Whitlam is there but Johnny O’Keeffe isn’t, so don’t you think that’s tokenistic for an Australian audience? I mean why would Gough be there and not Johnny O’Keeffe?”
The answer is: at a time when Europe was supposedly in the throes of radical political and social remodelling, the only Australian who counted was Gough Whitlam. A ’50s-throwback rocker such as Johnny O’Keeffe was an entirely overlooked irrelevance. Which further underlines the original point: don’t be distracted by the admittedly beguiling “soundtrack”.
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Another smart thing about Rock’n’Roll is the way music and “real” footage are slyly inserted to highlight how everyday lives (yours and mine) so often move in directions quite contrary and oblivious to the portentous matters and sounds of the moment. Wars break out, political movements rise and fall, assassinations happen and we might stop for a moment, glance at the world-shattering event, then go back to worrying about whether we are fancied, loved, about to be dumped, have remembered to buy toilet paper or forgotten to hand in the assignment on a contentious interpretation of a Sapphic fragment: that’s real life too, of course.
Stoppard’s question to himself arises because he and Vaclav Havel have much in common and many connections. Havel: writer, commentator, polemicist, prisoner, non-person and eventually first president of the post-Soviet Czech republic – a fabulous denouement that neither playwright’s imagination foretold – is virtually the same age as Stoppard (born Tomas Straussler). Both are Czech (Stoppard was raised in England from the age of nine) and both have built lives and careers on their uncommon talent with words and drama. So, what if Stoppard had returned to what was then Czechoslovakia and lived, as did Havel, with the Soviet boot on his neck and the secret police peering into his typewriter?
Would he too have become a dissident? Been imprisoned? Lost everything and gained the peculiar freedom that having nothing brings? Spent the greater part of his adult life squeezed by totalitarian dullness until he popped out the other end as a brilliantly articulate dissident and beacon of resistance? Or perhaps he would have been put to work in a state bakery and spent twelve years thumping dough. Who knows, least of all Stoppard.
What Stoppard does know, however, despite his reputation for erudition, intellectual fireworks and rarified rhetoric, is that such matters are of little consequence if not anchored to simple human aspirations: to love, death and the possibility of some kind of redemption. Despite being both an observer and sideline participant in some of the worst political and social excesses of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist era in Europe, Stoppard is no nihilist. And that simple fact, taken across his body of work, is probably what has made him so popular: with Stoppard you get hope, no matter how tragically or obliquely disguised.
What he does in Rock’n’Roll is to create three-dimensional human characters who service the ideas while at the same time the ideas are firmly harnessed in the service of the humans. The result is people whose place in the drama, as cogs to give forward impetus to the two decades of story/history covered by the play, does not mean they are either ciphers or stereotypes.
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Set in Cambridge and Prague, Rock'n'Roll begins with the short-lived hopes of Dubcek’s “Prague Spring” – the illusory thawing of Soviet Cold War attitudes towards its satellite “republics”. In Cambridge, meanwhile, Max, a Marxist history professor and lifelong member of “the Party” is as under siege as are the rebellious citizens of Prague. His arguments with his Czech protégé, Jan, (aka Stoppard-Havel) are monumental and when Jan decides to return to Prague, the two contrasting arenas are set up. Played with bitter conviction and heart by William Zappa, Max is an authentic unreconstructed believer who cannot bear what happened to the Revolution in which he so passionately and rationally believes.
Jan is both his nemesis and doppelganger: an apolitical pragmatist and realist whose own view of socialism is coloured by Stalin’s intervention into the process. While Max is appalled and furious at the casual linking, via graffiti, of the hammer and sickle with the swastika, Jan can only shout back at him that Stalin killed more Russians than the Nazis ever did. In an ironic twist that illuminates much about what was awful and hopeless in that time of tanks, troops and crushed flowers, it is Jan's precious record collection that eventually wakes him from his complacency.
But that happens later and meanwhile, Jan is and remains a total incompetent when it comes to human relations. He fails to grasp the emotional significance of the gift of her virginity that Max’s teenage daughter Esme (Chloe Armstrong) offers him on the eve of his departure; but is at the same time decent enough (or unwittingly cruel enough if looked at from Esme’s point of view) not to take advantage. Matthew Newton is a solid, convincing and charming Jan in a role that has few of the handy footholds to drama offered by more colourful characters.
In another sly move by the writer, the most eloquent and moving presence in the play lies with two women who are, in their different ways, peripheral to the main action: historical truth and irony in spades here. Both are played by Genevieve Picot, as Max’s literary academic wife Eleanor, in the first half, and as their daughter Esme, 20 years on, in the second. Both roles are a triumph of subtlety and honesty in writing and performance.
[page]Eleanor is slowly dying of cancer. Various bits of her body are being removed in vain attempts to halt the spread of the disease while she struggles to remain a person, a mind and a relevance in the lives of her students and husband. Through her Stoppard reconnoitres the arguments of brain versus mind and also the ways of seeing women, which were then being explored for the first time through feminist politics and academe. Picot is funny, dignified, passionate and heartbreaking in her demand to be a mind rather than a tit (having lost one already, along with most of her hair).
In the second half, as Esme, the psychic tables are turned in an excruciating fashion as Picot delicately fashions a woman of no apparent substance. Having grown up believing she was the lesser after-thought of two academically brilliant and forceful parents – one of whom took the rock star’s career move and died young(ish) and still beautiful and unfound-out – Esme is now the mother of a brilliant daughter (destined for early entry to Cambridge) and a self-deprecating wreck of a woman.
In a way – mothers and daughters being what they are – it is not surprising that Eleanor's feminist politics passed Esme by while she was in a haze of flowerchild escapism. Now, as she nervously struggles to find a role for herself in a family milieu that is accustomed to overlooking her, that haze is seen to be a smokescreen that successfully obscured her own potential from the person who needed to know it most.
As played by Picot (whose work is mainly seen in Melbourne these days) Esme is a brilliantly-realised character: when Jan returns and visits the now ailing 70-year-old Max, her desperate emotional conflict of trying to be invisible while wishing with all her heart that Jan will see her at last is utterly heart-rending and recognisable.
Also excellent in fully-rounded and plausible supporting roles are Danielle Cormack as Lenka, an ambitious young woman with sexual grappling irons hidden beneath her wispy gypsy skirts; Chloe Armstrong as young Esme and also, piquantly, as Esme's daughter Alice; and Melinda Butel in three roles across time and the social spectrum. Christopher Brown's role as Ferdinand is as a foil for Jan and he is a solemn and almost unctuous by turns. Grant Cartwright, Alex Menglet and Richard Sydenham between them add moments of authentic silliness and nastiness as the grey men of history whose relevance is in inverse proportions to their own sense of self importance.
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Never seen but frequently discussed is Syd Barrett the enigmatic creative spark in early Pink Floyd. His presence in the lives of the protagonists – whether in Prague or Cambridge – has an almost Alan Bennett-ish quirkiness and poignancy; he is the play's Lady in the Van and a sweet, sad digression.
Rock'n'Roll is a co-production with Melbourne Theatre Company and opened there earlier this year, directed by the MTC's Simon Phillips. Best known, in Sydney at least, for his light-hearted, humorous, campy style with "big" shows such as Priscilla, it shouldn't be forgotten that he also staged a spectacularly cerebral and serious Lulu for Opera Australia in 2003.
Rock'n'Roll is somewhere in between. It's great to look at with a clever, versatile set and rock concert lighting and sound rig (Stephen Curtis and Matt Scott) that place the actors in a revolving sequence of locations without resorting to a revolve. They range from Cambridge comfortable house and garden of the 70s (pine table, wine bottles, French garden furniture), to a poor Prague apartment (record player, grotty furniture); and so on. A large screen behind the rise-and-fall lighting rig offers visual clues and headlines (snow falling in Prague, spring green trees for Cambridge) as well as the archive news footage.
If you don't know what happened in Prague and Cambridge – and by association, throughout Europe – in those years before you enter the theatre, you will at the end of just under two hours. But that's only half the story. In the end, it's the human beings and their laughter, pain, dilemmas and aspirations who are the identifiable and identifiable-with raison d'etre for this and all the best drama. The history is a bonus. And like the best rock’n’roll, Rock’n’Roll is demanding, in your face, exhilarating and rewarding: if you’re prepared to go along for the ride and like it, like it, yes I do.
