Tom Stoppard's Plays so Far This Century: "Coast of Utopia", "Rock 'n' Roll"

In addition to a translation/adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV (Henry IV), the new plays by Sir Tom Stoppard (né Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1937; in British colonies from 1939-46 and in Britain since then) this millennium having been the 2002 Coast of Utopia trilogy of plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, and Rock 'n' Roll (2006).

Like other recent Stoppard plays (Hapgood, Arcadia, India Ink, The Invention of Love, which together with the earlier The Real Thing) these plays have many characters, mostly short scenes, with jumps in time and place between them. Some of the scenes involve a line or less, and reading them, I can't imagine how audiences know where or when the scenes take place. The information is in the texts...

Which raises the shibboleth "Plays are written to be performed, not read!" Yeah, yeah, yeah: there is something to this, but if plays are published, they are published to be read. I have seen half a dozen Stoppard plays staged and can visualize how lighting shifts from one part of the stage to another, and I realize that programs contain specification of times and places.

There is so much going on in Stoppard plays that being able to stop and think about a line or even reread an exchange is very welcome to me (and to other readers of his plays, I know). I had difficulty keeping up with Arcadia, not having read it, though not with Indian Ink and The Invention of Love, having a better sense of their background than the milieux (1809 and 1993) of Arcadia.

Coast of Utopia begins on the estate of future anarchist Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814 -1876). Bakunin and his friend Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870) are fierce advocates of the abolition of serfdom and make their way to European exile (there are scenes in England, France, Italy, and Switzerland), Herzen in comfort, Bakunin by escaping across the Pacific from Siberia. The affluent revolutionaries also interact with the budding novelist Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) who wrote about nihilists, personified by Bazarov in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, and the critic/editor of more modest (that is, non-aristocratic) background, Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (1811-1848). Belinsky dies between the two acts of the middle play (Shipwreck). Karl Marx also appears, growling, in the last play and a half, as Bakunin believes that he will oust Marx from the International rather than being ousted.

Talked about rather than dramatized, the revolution of 1848 (including a ludicrous German one) dashes Herzen's belief that the working class is the universal class that will bring about liberty, equality, and fraternity and realizes that the first two are more likely to be in conflict than in harmony. Herzen warned about dying for abstractions, especially sacrificing life for promises of a better future, and was the precursor of what we might now call a "checkbook liberal," though a classic liberal who valued liberty (for individuals, not like contemporary libertarians who are often dupes for the liberty of corporations).

Contrary to Bakunin's believe that The People are natural democrats waiting to be led out of bondage, the failure of the 1848 revolution showed Herzen that The People "are more interested in potatoes than freedom. Te people think equality means everyone should be oppressed equally. They love authority. They're suspicious of talent. They want government to govern for them and not against them. TO govern themselves doesn't enter their head" and that "dying for liberty or progress is not the ape of human happiness when the sacrifice is for vainglory"

Does this sound abstract? Well, it should, 'cause the characters go on and on about philosophy in the first play in which they "progress" or follow the fashions from Schelling and Fichte to Hegel and idealization of History. In the later two plays, the characters argue about the direction of History and the inevitability of progress (material, spiritual, whatever). Belinsky is more concerned with literature, but his enthusiasms veer about, too (he remains notorious for proclaiming James Fenimore Cooper's genius greater than Shakespeare's, but gets credit for championing Gogol and Turgenev).

In addition to the failed revolutions in Europe of 1848 and 1870, the Big Background Event is the abolition of serfdom (with no grants of land to the approximately eighty percent of the Russian population who were serfs) by Czar Alexander II (who ruled 1855-81(, whose reforms Herzen considered "revolution from above" preferable for being less destructive of Culture (and aristocratic comforts) than insurrections from below. Alexander II curbed reforms after an 1866 assassination attempt and was never in the least amenable to letting go of Poland, which was a disappointment to Herzen, who was willing to sacrifice that good for others.

Herzen is the central figure across the trilogy, has the best lines and speeches. Turgenev's puppy dog following married opera star, mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) around. Neither Viradot nor the Czar appears onstage, but the character list for each play runs to two pages nonetheless.

Herzen's advocacy of liberty did not extend to sexual freedom for his wife, whose affair with a German leftist outraged him. Herzen's wife, mother, deaf son, and the son's tutor drowned in a literal shipwreck (though I think the title of the middle play refers more to the shipwreck of utopian hopes than to this event, which is offstage and like so much else in the plays reported rather than shown/dramatized). The pained confrontation between Natalie and Alexander Herzen is, to me, the only onstage drama in any of the three plays. Obviously, it is a domestic spat.

I wonder how American audiences with so little general historical knowledge even of US history can understand what is going on either among the Russian characters of Coast of Utopia or in France, Germany, Italy, or Russia during the mid-19th century. The Broadway mounting of the play won a slew of Tonys, including Best New Play, though I'd bet the audience was drawn more by movie stars Ethan Hawke (as Herzen) and Billy Crudrup (as Belinsky) than by interest in the political/philosophical disputes or Russian exiles before and after the abolition of serfdom and before the Bolshevik seizer of power in 1917.

Despite more complicated syntax, I think that Sir Isaiah Berlin's essay on Herzen's life and ideas (first published as an introduction to Herzen's memoirs, available in Berlin's Russian Thinkers and The Proper Study of Mankind) is as dramatic as Stoppard's trilogy and easier to follow. I'd heartily recommend it to anyone planning on seeing the trilogy on stage (and, indeed, anyone interested in the subject of 19th-century exiled Russian thinkers) along with Berlin's essays on Bakunin and Turgenev. "Isaiah Berlin is one of two author without whom I could not have written these plays," Stoppard has said, the other being E. H. Carr's Romantic Exiles.

++++++

Rock 'n' Roll, winner of London Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play, opens in a Cambridge (UK) garden in 1968 with the increasingly erratic Sy Barrett (1946-2006), who had recently been ejected from Pink Floyd, what had been a psychedelic rock band (and became a greater international sensation as a progressive rock band) in which Barrett had been chief songwriter and lead guitarist. To the teenage daughter, Esme, of a doctrinaire communist don Max, he was a vision of Pan.

Her mother Eleanor, who is dying of cancer, gives tutorials at home on Sappho. Eleanor has a dramatic speech about death before being laid to rest, but the lessons in ancient Greek and Latin seem to me to make a long and complex play longer and more mystifying. Perhaps they are there to represent another way of being in the world, the paganism of Esme's imaging their LSD-addled neighbor as Pan.

The main conflict is more in the realm of ideas, albeit ideas of the utopian aspect of rock 'n' roll and whether base (the means of production) determines "superstructure" (including music of any sort) or whether rebellion (rock music) can unsettle the base.

Max (who at least twice proclaims that he is the same age as the Soviet Revolution) is the advocate for anything other than the economic system mattering. His Czech student Jan returns to Prague as the "Prague Spring" (premature perestroika) with a suitcase full of rock albums. To accept the division of base and superstructure is to give primacy to the base, and Jan believes in rock 'n 'roll and maybe love, but not the second member of the Baby Boom trinity of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n 'roll." Not that he seems to have had sex with Esme.

The play ricochets back and forth across a span of 22 years from Max's (a house owned by the university) and Prague, where Jan has confrontations with state security interrogators, and takes Milan Kundera's position that signing petitions is exhibitionism that does not help political prisoners, and that any success at having a private life and enjoyment counts as dissidence in a would-be totalitarian state (passive resistance in the tradition of the good soldier Schweik). However, Jan signs Charter 77 (provoked by the late-1976 arrest of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe for "organized disturbance of the peace") and is jailed.

Ferdinand (the name of the protagonist of three plays by Václav Havel in which Ferdinand is a version of himself) advocates protest and the subversiveness of rock 'n' roll (at the end of the play, President Havel is described giving a tour of the Castle to the Rolling Stones). The play does not extend to the accusations of elitism against Havel and his "non-political politics" during Havel's presidency (that ended in 2004).

Earlier (in a version of the Kundera/Havel polemic), Jan argued: "What difference does long hair make? The policeman is angry about his fear. He's frightened by indifference.... The policeman isn't frightened by dissidents? Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loves heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defender of the faith" and "Everything's dissident except shutting up eating shit" from the rulers.

The 60s mantra of "Tune in, turn on, and drop out" (not just from politics but from making a living did not bring down either capitalism or communism, and rock in the west was easily co-opted. In the communist bloc where any gathering no sponsored by the state was seen as a threat, rock was, perhaps, more subversive, though eventually there were state-sponsored rock concert in Prague and elsewhere in the Warsaw Pact countries.

Stoppard does not take a firm stand on whether rock was dissent or whether it was or not, whether dissidents/dissidence brought down the Soviet empire. The failures of state capitalism (ye olde base) is surely what Max sees as having mattered along with the commodification of any sort of superstructural activity (rock musicians with the exception of The Plastic People of the Universe proving willing to sell out and enjoy privileges, failing any transformative role as much as the French working class did in 1848, watched by Michael Herzen.

Max recounts much more of the history of what he does not view as the Soviet Empire in"RnR") than Stoppard has any of the characters in Coast of Utopia do. Though condemning Dubcek and the "Prague Spring" and approving of the Soviet tanks restoring a hardline Leninist government, at the end of the play, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist autocracy ruling Czechoslovakia, Max, ca. 1990. remains smug about the "merely cultural revolution" of rock'n'roll that left the system in place in 1968, because "altering the psyche has no effect on the social structure. You drop out or you fit in. In the end you [plural] fitted in," rock rebels east and west, that is.

In the early part of his distinguished career, Stoppard eschewed politics, but at the same time as Charter 77 in the land of his birth, he became a human rights activist with the Index on Censorship, Amnesty International, and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse. "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" (1977) was the first of his plays to be concerned with politics. From his public pronouncements, his views seem close to those of Herzen, who was also a hero to Isaiah Berlin (and to me).

BTW, Stoppard provided an introduction about the transformation of a play in which he imagined himself having returned to Czechoslovakia after World War II, to one centering on the Havel/Kundera dispute, to the one with the mix of a British Marxist, British classicists, and a Czech rock fan and reluctant dissident, who eventually revisits Cambridge after the communist state dissolves. The book also includes a chronology of events in the live of Sy Barrett, Czechoslovak history, and rock landmarks relating to Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and the Velvet Underground, groups whose music is mentioned or cued within the play. At least the single volumes of the Coast of Utopia trilogy lack a chronology or any supplementary material.