A BLAST FROM THE PAST TO INSPIRE OR IRRITATE
By the interval I was mournfully unconvinced that there was any point at all in reviving Tom Stoppard’s 17-year-old play , about Communist ideals and philosophical betrayals in Cambridge and Prague 1968-1990 – all reflected through a young male obsession with rock and roll albums and the Velvet Underground. The background story is worth telling: the Prague Spring, Charter 77, the rolling-in of Soviet tanks, dissident heroism , the ascent to Presidency of an actual playwright, Vaclav Havel. It is close to Stoppard’s own heritage and deeply felt. I wanted to see it, having held a candle in the treet as a student in 1969 in tribute to Jan Palach’s suicide and since made the liberal’s pilgrimage to Wenceslas Square.
But Lord, despite Nina Raine’s deft direction and some wonderful performances, the first half both drags and – if you were around in the late 60s – irritates. Those clever yet compliant and usable women, still in awe of the men! That shaggy Syd Barrett figure fascinating them with his panpipes! Those self-important philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the mechanism of the brain , or the vital conflict of international Marxism versus Czech nationalist socialism, and whether to side with Havel or Milan Kundera! It felt prehistoric, irrelevant, self indulgent, frankly dull.
Never mind. What keeps you there and gets you back after the interval are the characters, all perfectly shown: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as earnest Jan is patronized by Nathaniel Parker’s peppery self-righteous Communist believer Max: Jan goes back to Czechoslovakia to be part of the dissident movement, which is heroic, while Max remains in uxorious academic comfort with his dying classicist wife – Nancy Carroll, as ever, magnificent as Eleanor, sharply aware of the student Lenka who eyes up her husband. Jan in Prague suffers for his patriotic belief that socialism can have a human face, Max remains unwilling to admit the crushing cruelties of the Soviet Union and thinks only of ‘the workers’ (who are absolutely absent from the play, and I doubt Max personally even helps the women with the washing up).
There are as usual some wonderful Stoppardian insights into the psychology of our settled old Land (it’s still the 70s, remember) like the observation that while for comfortable people like us, freedom just means “leave me alone” while for the masses it means “give me a chance!”. Meanwhile the post-Christian angst about whether there’s a soul tangles up with the middle-common-room politics of socialism, while the Pan-like figure of a Syd Barrett (Brenock O”Connor, rather brilliant) scampers around bashing a guitar because once people give up on religion they need a bit of mystery to spice life up. There is little sense of the reality of human sufferings of the time, beyond the secret police smashing up all Jan’s albums. Except the Beach Boys.
But after the interval, praise God, it comes good and moves faster. Years have rolled on, Nancy Carroll is now playing the dead Eleanor’s hippyish daughter, divorced from a ghastly journalist and still dreaming about the Pan-figure “a beautiful boy, as old as music, half goat…we were all beautiful then”. Jan, older and sadder after prison, twelve years enforced labour and his country’s climb into freedom, is back on a visit to the old parlour-Stalinist Max. Who still has “nothing to defend” and remains dismissive of the women he uses (“take a woman to bed, don’t take a woman to bed, it’s the same”).
Jan has a revelation for him: they were, to some extent, in the police-state years each betraying the other. In an amusingly hideous Cambridge-academic way the characters – plus the awful journalist’s even more awful columnist wife – are all to meet for a fish pie meal . Lenka the student has grown up and stayed safe in Cambridge to read Sappho and sneer about our British “democracy of obedience and apology”. But the story is completed, as the century creeps to its end, with a kind of acceptance of the laziness of the twin ‘60s simplifications – make-love-not-war and workers-of-the-world-unite . There are a few sharp lines about modern journalism, which are true. One moving love story is completed, and so are two rather less inspiring ones.
So not sorry I went. But I’d take an axe to some of the first-half dialogue.
box office hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 Jan
rating 3
theatreCat 