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:: Thursday, July 27, 2006 ::

The Stoppard Debate # 2

Rock on Tommy!

It took me many years to realise that actually I greatly dislike the Royal Court Theatre. On the face of it, this is somewhat paradoxical, as many of the plays and careers that I love and admire from the last fifty years of British theatre have come from the Royal Court. I also have always found the staff of the Royal Court to have been unerringly friendly and helpful over the hundreds of times that I have been there, and it has even provided gainful employment to several individuals whom I would consider friends.

And yet, I now realise that it is an institution that positively discourages the sensation of pleasure. It is there in the very fabric of the building, the stripped and exposed beams and bricks of the place, the stark and underlit colour sheme of black and grey. Kenneth Tynan once wrote of there being Roundhead and Cavalier theatres, and throughout the last fifty years the Court has positioned itself on the side of the republic. The mythical history of the Court is one of urgency and unfussiness- from Osborne's ironing board to Saved to Blasted. Yet this tradition has always co-existed with a pragmatic periodical need to stage a hit that tends not to feature so greatly in the narrative; later Osborne after George Devine had died, Richard O'Brien's T-Z, Christopher Hampton's Treats, the American co-productions of the eighties, the continued place of Kevin Elyot and Terry Johnson in the repertoire.

Rock'n'Roll must be seen as part of this tradition, which has bought us both good and bad plays, rather than as some uncharacteristic abberation in the Court's history. While admittedly not one of the great Stoppards like Arcadia or The Invention of Love, neither is it one of his occasional muddles such as Hapgood or Indian Ink nor a play that collapses under the weight of its own research as did The Coast of Utopia. It is emphatically not, as has been suggested, an empty play about nothing. It touches upon many themes, but addresses them lightly and through inference and paradox, unlike, say, the startling directness of Motortown or the - much less interesting - journalistic approach of Talking to Terrorists or My Name Is Rachael Corrie. Each argument and idea about liberty, freedom of expression and ecstacy is reflected in the other themes and scenes in the play. This non-didactic approach requires a certain open-mindedness and imaginative playfullness on the part of the audience.

The play's greatest achievement is that it places the rock music of the sixties away from its usual home as a form of nostalgia and recreation, and right back in the fulcrum of arguments about counter-culture that it occupied at the time. It achieves this through questioning various notions of dissidence, including rock music and playing them off against each other in the communist Czechoslovakia of the period. Unlike the previous correspondent (who must presumably be some kind of authority on Czech counter-culture of the seventies) I did learn a great deal about The Plastic People of the Universe and their supression by the communist state and, through this well-chosen illustration, much about society and oppression. To complain that the play ignores punk rock and hip-hop is churlish in the extreme. In the case of punk, the years between 1977 and 1987 are not depicted, and Rock'n'Roll must be seen as a play, not as a reference book on the history of popular music. It's hardly surprising that the music featured in the second act becomes more conservative, as the characters have become middle-aged. It really would feel incongrous for them to be listening to, say, Niggaz With Attitude or The Young Gods in 1989.

It has also been claimed that Rock'n'Roll is a play without incident. The worst thing that happens to somebody - they get their records smashed - is ,within the context of the play and with the symbolic weight that the records carry, actually an event of some touchingness and importance - more so than some of the rapes and disembowlings in some of the lesser plays of the in-yer-face school that the Court has presented. The interrogation scene is both funny and unnerving - not all interrogations climax in bloodbaths, but all require some compromise of the notion of truth, a point that the scene illustrates admirably. Like many great plays, Rock'n'Roll achieves its effects and explores its ideas through a balance of showing and telling.

The play also presents its audience with the welcome return to the London stage of Rufus Sewell, who gives a performance of rare sensitivity and irony. His depictions of innocence, knowingness, compromise and suffering are continously interesting and intelligent and prevent the character of Jan from becoming the saintly hero that a lesser play would make him.

The audience at the Court were rather atypical, but not the worthless rabble that the previous correspondant rather alarmingly damns them as, and certainly no more or less irritating to be sat amongst than the usual Royal Court crowd of middle-aged Time Out readers and drama students. Anyway, ticket prices were the same for Rock'n'Roll as they were for everything else at the Court. What certainly was incongrous to that theatre was the sound of merry laughter coming from the audience and the prospect of a play there offering pleasure to them. For a few weeks this summer The Royal Court was transformed into a Cavalier theatre, a place of wit and sunshine, a moment that one hopes will occur again sometime soon, but one that bitter experience has taught one certainly not to expect from the institution.

Of course, it is possible that I could be wrong, and that the next offering downstairs - a play by Tanika Gupta about sex tourism - might continue Stoppard's good works in presenting us with genuinely funny and original jokes, interesting characters, moral force and intellect.

We shall see.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Thursday, July 27, 2006

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