Stoppard and the Wilma

The dissenters:
Stoppard and the Zizkas, together again

JIM RUTTER

At the recent opening of Ying Tong, the Wilma Theater proudly announced that it had secured the rights to produce Tom Stoppard’s latest play, Rock ’n Roll, as part of its 2008-09 season.

If Stoppard’s recent Coast of Utopia trilogy was his monumental work, Rock ‘n Roll is perhaps his most disjointed but also his most ambitious— shifting as it does back and forth between Cambridge and Prague over three decades. The play’s chief virtues lies in how Stoppard solidifies a character type introduced in Sophocles’s Antigone, progressing historically through Arthur Miller’s John Proctor (in The Crucible) and Henrik Ibsen’s Dr. Thomas Stockmann (An Enemy of the People), and now culminating in Stoppard’s Jan in Rock ‘n Roll.

Each of these characters represents the painful historical archetype of a person holding political ideals or possessing civic virtues suppressed within his or her own culture. These characters’ championing of an ideal view of humanity and human rights— notions long ground underfoot by society— renders them foreigners in their own land, immortalizing them forever in writing as the dissident.

In Rock ‘n Roll, Stoppard subtly offers two such idealistic outsiders. One is Max Morrow (played on Broadway by the razor-sharp Brian Cox), an unrepentant Cambridge professor of Marxism, the “last of his breed” member of the quickly diminishing Communist Party in England after the Prague Spring of 1968.

Life as a Marxist theory

An ivory tower hero in his own mind, Max believes that “theory and practice need only provide a 'decent' fit.” While many of his colleagues worry that the “atrocities of Communism will one day be forgotten,” he similarly despairs for Communism’s “achievements.” Entirely committed to seeing life through the lens of a theory, he can’t even come to terms with the reality of his wife’s cancer, and his insistence on a mere abstract way of living only intensifies her suffering.

But it’s through the Czech dissident Jan (in an astounding performance by Rufus Sewell) that Stoppard makes clear the true horror that lies dormant in any society: the suppression of the individual coerced to submit to an ideal, the tribe, the majority or tradition. While Morrow leads a relatively luxurious life of intellectual pursuits in the politically free climes of Britain, Jan’s mere preference for Western music bars him from employment, forces him to live off the charity of friends and eventually lands him in prison for the “crime” of owning a record collection.

It’s heartbreaking to watch Jan break from enlightened, happy, buoyant foreigner in England to being crushed under an iron fist in Prague, even more heartbreaking to think that he was one of billions reduced to human rubble by the tanks that rolled across Europe and Asia to enforce communism.

While it’s certainly clear that some in the West (Morrow’s daughter Esmé, for example) suffer from an abundance of (bad) choices, it’s nearly intolerable to hear Morrow argue that society needs to look eastward for salvation in a society that coercively strips all choice away.

The music of liberation

Meanwhile, a border crossing away, the excesses of liberalism’s insistence on maximal freedom of personal expression culminated in the music of rock ’n roll. While Western commentators denounced rock as the music of youth rebellion and decadence, to those behind the Iron Curtain it represented the pinnacle of human freedom.

Rock ‘n Roll makes it seem like Stoppard is one of the few who understand this, nearly overwhelming us with the degree of seriousness and sensitivity with which he treats the oeuvre of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, etc. As a piece of each song plays in the breaks between scenes, the curtains descend so that a projector can boldly display the title, performer, writer, location, producer, musicians, etc. And by this device—in the context of characters studying the poetry of Sappho—Stoppard gives this music the same weight that literary critics usually accord to the ancient Greek and Roman poetry, mimicking their focus on translator, manuscript, edition, line and verse, time and place, etc.

It’s a brilliant contention, arguing in effect that one day these poets of the ’60s and ’70s will be seen in the same light and with the same merit as scholars now view these Greek and Roman paragons of human expression. It’s a recognition that rock musicians, in their own way, bore a similar influence upon the preservation of human freedom.

Understanding a generation’s excesses

Through the integration of rock music and Jan’s story, Stoppard forever redeems the artistic excesses of an entire generation by presenting a context for understanding them. Jan only longs to hear his views reflected in the culture of his own times, through the underground renegade Czech band Plastic People of the Universe. When their music is suppressed by the Czech government, Jan imports luggage cases full of these freedom-expressing albums.

When he returns from prison for this dissident act to find his record albums smashed, Jan commits the bravest act of his life: He signs the Charter 77 declaration, saying to his oppressive government that if it denies him his one sliver of freedom in music, he will demand the removal of all other constraints on his liberty. It’s an incredibly powerful moment, one that offers a near condemning contrast to our own age. Jan’s sincere and incredibly risky dissidence— inherited from his Western contemporaries of the ’60s— underscores the passivity of today’s American voters, whose ingratitude for the freedoms they enjoy is only equaled by an apathy about the civil liberties they’ve lost.

The Wilma’s founders, Jiri and Blanka Zizka, lived through the events depicted in Rock ‘n Roll (before emigrating to the U.S. in the late 1970s, both were involved in Czech underground theater; on one occasion the Zizkas were summoned before party bureaucrats for the offense of mentioning God and the Bible in a play). That experience, I hope, will enable them to make much more sense of this very disjointed, incredibly ambitious play. If the price of freedom—artistic and political—is eternal vigilance, then historically, from Sophocles to Stoppard, part of that vigilance demands the continual depiction of the dissident’s struggles on stage. I can’t wait to see how the Zizkas stage this dissident’s play in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American liberty.

The Wilma will host a conversation with Tom Stoppard on Sunday, March 8, 2008 at 4:30. At the Wilma, 265 S. Broad St. (at Spruce). (215) 546-7824 or www.wilmatheater.org.