I’ve often thought of writing an autobiography set in a parallel world in which
Posted in General on 02. Sep, 2010
“I’ve often thought of writing an autobiography set in a parallel world in which I did go home to Czechoslovakia after the war But I never started it. Jan [one of the main characters in Rock'n'Roll] is a vestigial gesture towards that”. With dates that are almost the same as Stoppard’s, and a wartime childhood in England, the anglophile Jan is like an imaginary alter ego. Dispatched back to Czechoslovakia in 1948, he returns to England in the 1960s to study philosophy at Cambridge with Max Morrow, a fiery, unrepentant Marxist who refuses to relinquish faith in the spirit of the Bolshevik revolution, despite the enormities that followed – including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that sends Jan, of his own accord, back to Prague.Like Stoppard, Jan is a big rock fan. A crucial, if offstage, presence in the piece is the real-life psychedelic Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, who were persecuted by Gustav Husak’s hardening regime and forced to go underground.
Their eventual arrest and trial in 1976 became, to the government’s astonishment, a cause c?bre, sparking the protest that led to Charter 77. Vaclav Havel famously emerged from the tragic farce in the courtroom declaring that “from now on, being careful seems so petty”. One of the things that captivates Stoppard is the fact that The Plastic People “never set out to be symbols of resistance. In the West, bands love to be perceived as engaged and politically motivated and don’t mind at all if the press writes about their protest rather than their music But The Plastic People resented this. They wanted to be appreciated for their work”.It took a while, he says, for the writers, artists and surrealist playwrights, who were working at menial jobs because of their courageous dissent, to see the point of the Plastics, and vice versa. “The intellectuals thought the Plastic People were a bunch of long-haired layabouts who weren’t engaged in what mattered, and the underground thought that the intellectuals were a kind of official opposition.” What rattled the authorities was the band’s refusal to play the game according to the regime’s rules. The Plastic People threw away the board and the rulebook and, because of their superb indifference, were incorruptible.”Ultimately, that’s what Havel found attractive about them,” Stoppard says.
“Thanks to the band, intellectuals came to realise that ‘living in truth’ [Havel's famous maxim about the need to keep making authentic personal decisions in a repressive society] could take the form of attending a rock concert.”The play, says Stoppard, dramatises the internal disputes and spread of attitudes in the opposition (Jan has a friend, Ferda, who talks like Havel). Where on the spectrum, I wondered, does Stoppard think he would have stood? The real question, he replies, is what he would he have done about it – not whether he’d have been able to see the difference between justice and injustice, but whether he’d have had the courage to sign Charter 77. And that he’ll never know.Stoppard, famously reticent on the subject of his private life in interviews, has been married twice. His first marriage, to Jose Ingle, a nurse, in 1965, lasted seven years. In 1972, he married Miriam Moore-Robinson, now better known as Dr Miriam, the racy television medic and therapist. Their partnership lasted 20 years, until the playwright left her for the actress Felicity Kendal, who had been the leading lady of several of his plays, including his study of a playwright’s infidelity, The Real Thing.
They separated in 1998.Stoppard has two sons from each marriage, although only one of the four, Ed, 31, has followed his father into the theatre; he recently played Hamlet in English Touring Theatre’s production. The three other sons have branched out in diverse directions. Will is a manager in the music business; Barnaby is a director of commercials; and Oliver has a PhD and works as a postman.In his Diaries, Peter Hall complains, after seeing one of Stoppard’s works, that “it’s about too many things, everything that is in Tom’s head at the moment.. somehow he has tried to make it into one play. It’s four at least.” At his best, though, Stoppard is a dramatist who can make wildly disparate-seeming subjects constellate in brilliant, mutually illuminating ways. In Arcadia (1993), chaos theory, changing fashions in landscape gardening, entropy, and a disputed point in the biography of Lord Byron are brought together by an intellectually playful and emotionally piercing story. So it’s no surprise to learn that, alongside the pop and the politics, Rock’n'Roll will treat the audience to (among other things) arguments over the materialist theory of consciousness and analysis of the texts of the Lesbian Greek poet Sappho.Stoppard is engagingly open about the other ways he’d once thought of giving these interests dramatic form. For* *example, his earlier plans for Sappho “had nothing to do with Rock’n'Roll It was a structural thing Her poems survive as fragments.
There’s one complete poem, and another that may be complete but looks a bit funny at the end. I’d always imagined these fragments were quite substantial but when I went to see the papyrus bits in the Sackler Library in Oxford, they looked like a box of cornflakes. What caught my eye is that a number of people have attempted to reassemble the poems and to guess what is missing. This is how it connects with Arcadia, where there’s a guy in the present who is trying to reconstruct what happened in 1812 and, because the play shifts between the two periods, we can see where he’s getting it wrong. So I thought: why not extend the principle and present the audience with 50 fragments of scenes and alternative versions of events to complete them.”It’s a measure of Stoppard’s ingenuity and adaptability that Sappho’s poetry surfaces in Rock’n'Roll in a completely different guise, as part of an impassioned argument about the Marxist take on consciousness – that it’s the social order that determines consciousness not the other (revolution-in-the-head) way round.In 1976, Stoppard said: “I tend to overreact against the large claims of committed theatre, so-called, because it is an ill-afforded luxury for an artist to convince himself that he has effectively done his bit because he grapples with important problems. The effect of art is very long-term and each artist is only a tiny part of that effect”.