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Encore Theatre Magazine

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:: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 ::

The Stoppard Debate # 1

You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun

Rock'n'Roll - 'Tom Stoppard's astonishing new play' (Guardian), 'Stoppard's complex and moving new play' (Independent), 'Stoppard's extraordinary, epic drama of politics, persecution and protest' (Evening Standard) - is repulsive.

It is as if nothing in the world of theatre or music has happened for the last thirty years. There is nothing rock 'n' roll about it. The Royal Court used to be the rock 'n' roll theatre, the theatre of anarchy and rebellion, of counter-culture and fuck the system. It was the theatre that broke the law to stage Saved. It was the theatre that staged Blasted. In a year that should be celebrating its place as the one true forum for challenging, provocative, polemical and experimental writing and its commitment to art over commerce, it has whored itself to secure the financial security of a West End run and is currently opening its doors to the most pampered and patronised audience in the country. It's as if someone’s grandfather had been invited to perform with his folk band at an underground rave. This must not be tolerated. What is worse is that the critics do not know how to review it. Every review says in various ways 'Tom Stoppard is very clever. More clever than I am. His play is about lots of things...'

Here are a few things they should have said:

1. The play is NOT about lots of things. lots of things are mentioned (cancer, Czechoslovakia, the mind versus the soul, rock 'n' roll as a more powerful instrument of revolution than communism, etc.) but mentioning something does not mean that is what a play is about. Also, nothing said by anyone is any richer or more spiritually nourishing than reading the back of a self-help book or an encyclopedia of cod philosophy. (That's right. Philosophy written by fish.) The conversations and observations are banal beyond reason.
2. Even though the play takes place over several decades and has many characters, nothing seems to happen to any of them. Ever. They just have some conversations. The worst thing to happen to anyone is that they get their records broken. Big wup.
3. Rock 'n' roll has no impact on the plot. Not that there actually is a plot. If you were to take out the guy's vague interest in music (and let's face it, he's hardly on a par with most of the record obsessives I know), it would have no impact.
4. The music starts well (Velvet Underground, vintage Pink Floyd, etc). by the second half however, we have U2 and Guns 'n' Roses. Those bands are fine, but you can't really get more middle of the road. For a play that is about the counter cultural power of subversive music as a tool of revolution and should be celebrating the importance of rebellious music, there is nothing in the form of the play, the characters, the plot or the music that is anything other than comfortable. This play is as safe and as middle-of-the-road as you can possibly get, to the point of vomiting bile, if it didn't make you too bored to puke.
5. I learnt nothing. nothing about myself, about Czechoslovakia, about theatre. nothing.
6. It's more than three hours long.
7. The set (maybe I'm nit-picking here) - why spend thousands and thousands on putting a revolve in to help keep the action swift in between scene changes, if you're going to bring a curtain down every six minutes and play half of Stoppard's very dull record collection?
8. Every time you hear about the plastic people band, you'll wish you were watching a play about them. You know, one in which something happens.
9. This play had more than two weeks of previews. All other Royal Court plays have what? Four days?
10. The play was booked into the West End before it even opened at the Court. the arrogance of this is so fucking overwhelming it is almost funny. It also begs the question - why bother? Surely the only thing that should define the Court's artistic policy is that you do plays that couldn't be done anywhere else. Particularly when it has meant the postponement of the young writers' festival, thereby postponing six or seven new careers by a year, by which time many opportunities will have passed them by. Angry yet?
11. Nobody knows fucking anything about fucking anything. It is astounding that people who are intelligent enough to dress themselves and turn up to a theatre are not intelligent enough to clamber out of their seats and attack Stoppard and Nunn with their shoes. Worse than that, people are creaming over this play in the press. It's bad enough we have to sit through three-plus hours of Stoppard self-pleasuring without intellectually retarded reviewers who want to lube up and join in.
12. Shamefully, I was actually looking forward to it. I thought it would have to be pretty fucking special, or at least a little bit interesting.
13. The Royal Court is going to smell of anais anais until the end of the run, and be overrun by public schoolboys with upturned collars and too much hair and their toothy girlfriends.
14. Punk is not mentioned. This is a play about counter-cultural music doesn't acknowledge punk. Or electronic music (there is a disdainful comment about Kraftwerk). Or hip hop. Or drum and bass, the only real underground dance music to emerge from London.
15. It is totally fucking irrelevant to anything.
16. There is the most excruciatingly embarrassing scene in which Stoppard tries to write Pinter. if you're going to do that, particularly at the Royal Court, you better be really fucking sure of yourself. It will make you want to kill someone just to get the memory of how woefully misjudged it was out of your mind. An interrogation scene in which the worst thing that happens is that Rufus Sewell eats part of a slightly stale biscuit.
17. The climax is a dinner party in Cambridge where someone is hit with a newspaper. Yep. Read that again. That's the climax. After three hours and several decades of British and Czech history, it comes down to that. Oh, and a plate gets smashed, helping to wake up the husbands in the audience in time for the end.
18. There is no irony in a devout communist mouthing off whilst opening a bottle of chilled Chateau Petrus in his stately Cambridgeshire home.
19. It is one of the ugliest, worst lit sets you will ever see.
20. Most depressing of all is that the play makes you wonder at what age we stop listening, stop questioning, stop learning. This is a man who writes plays as if the last few decades never happened, and who thinks U2 are a counter-cultural force. Doesn't it make you want to die in your sleep?

Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell are very good though.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Wednesday, July 26, 2006

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Comments:

A disdainful comment about Kraftwerk? How dare he. I'm definitely not going now. I'd almost persuaded myself to see it in the WE - couldn't bring myself to see it at the Court, my cursor hovered over the ORDER SEATS button on the website months back, but I couldn't get past the thought of Churchill, Gaskell and co - but your review puts paid to the idea. Like you, I felt there had to be something unmissable about it, but sometimes hype is just that, sadly.

# posted by  sbs : 30/7/06 6:45 pm

 

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