In the bad old Brezhnev days when I lived in Moscow, there were two things that seemed equally unlikely to ever happen; a rock concert in Red Square, and a performance of a Tom Stoppard play in a Moscow theatre. Three decades on, rocking around the mausoleum is routine stuff, and Stoppard has a respected place in the repertoire since the staging in Moscow in 2007 of The Coast of Utopia, his trilogy about 19th century Russian intellectuals.
Now the Russian Academic Youth Theatre (RAMT), which staged that play, is putting on Rock'n'Roll, Sir Tom's subtle exploration of the balance between culture and politics, first staged in London at the Royal Court in 2006 with Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell in the main roles of Max, a hardline British communist professor at Cambridge, and his Czech graduate student Jan who returns to Prague from England after the 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring by the Soviet Union and its allies. Max sees reform communist Alexander Dubcek as a traitor and lines up behind Moscow; but the real faultline between them is a much more subtle one. Jan cares more about rock'n'roll than politics, and worries more about the fate of his favourite band Plastic People of the Universe than about the rights and wrongs of Marxism. The play follows the two men and their wives and partners and children over a generation until the final collapse of communism and the iron curtain. In a way Stoppard's writing is a tribute to his friend Vaclav Havel, also a playwright (though not as good a one as Stoppard). I have always admired Stoppard for his unwavering liberalism and his long record of support for Soviet bloc dissidents at a time when other British playwrights like David Hare were flirting with half-baked leftwing revolution. When communism collapsed, it was the consistent anticommunists like Stoppard who were vindicated.
The question posed by Rock'n'Roll is one that often occurred to me a generation ago in Moscow; perhaps what the Soviet Union needed to shake it out of stagnation was not so much political reform as a tour by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? Unfortunately, the answer to that question from the hindsight of 2011 has to be a resounding no. You only have to watch the Youtube clips of Vladimir Putin applauding Paul Macartney playing in Red Square in 2005 to realise that rock music's 'revolutionary' alternative message of liberation turned out to be fraudulent. It was Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the politicians, who brought change to the Soviet Union, not Mick Jagger. Rock and roll, we now know, can be wrapped around any political agenda, from Putin to Palin. I suspect Stoppard knows this perfectly well, but the poetic essence of his play is that human consciousness has another dimension that goes beyond politics. The story of Pink Floyd's lost genius Syd Barrett haunts Jan and Max's hippie daughter Esme, taking them to a level of awareness that escapes most of the other characters. I don't think it's Stoppard's best play by any means, but its subject matter is probably the one closest to him, and it shows a sharp understanding of how individuals' lives are shaped by big historical events.
Unfortunately the Moscow production doesn't serve the play well. Director Adolf Shapiro and designer Alexander Shishkin have chosen a conceptual approach which squeezes all the life and the poetry out of Stoppard's play. They have decided that this is a play about the iron curtain and constructed a giant rusty metal wall that covers the entire height and width of the stage. The actors have to play their scenes inside the steel boxes that project forwards from this framework. They spend much of their time climbing up and down ladders and crouching on all fours. Not surprisingly, they don't get much opportunity to develop their parts. Only Ramiliya Iskander as Esme, who is allowed out of the box framework to roam downstage, makes any kind of connection with the audience. Shapiro is an old theatrical veteran, not a young Turk, but the result is -- to me at least -- very disappointing. Russian actors are usually terrific on stage, but not in this production, and the theatre's poor acoustics don't help. The redeeming feature of this production, which is partly backed by Alexander Lebedev, is the choice of rock music, including 'Barbara Ann' and 'I can't get no satisfaction'. And it's translated by Arkady and Sergei Ostrovsky, who have a good understanding of the complicated subtexts buried in Stoppard's script. What the playwright himself made of this production when it opened in late September, he probably kept to himself in his usual courteous style.
Because of the Russian repertory system, the play is only getting a few outings each month and on the night I was there in late October, the audience was enthusiastic. However I couldn't escape the feeling that many of its themes may have seemed a bit old hat to the Moscow audience. Russians, rightly or wrongly, have had quite enough of the recent past. The Gorbachev-Dubcek debates over reform communism, like vinyl LPs, really don't set their pulses racing any more. For me the play never quite seemed to climb out of second gear -- a feeling that also struck me when I saw the original London production by Trevor Nunn with a rather better cast and set. It's too episodic, there are too many characters and some of them, particularly Max, don't quite ring true. Nonetheless, the fact that Moscow audiences can now see Stoppard's plays (and do normal things like listening to rock music in Red Square) never ceases to cheer me up. Those particular iron boxes have rusted away, hopefully for good.
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