My esteemed colleague and predecessor
Ian Herbert kept trying to make me understand that this column is a
place in which I should stir things up a bit. I sometimes feel a
little disappointed that my opinion of plays so often chime with the
critical consensus. I know that I can also be quite gauche when
taking issue with that consensus, often beginning along the lines of “I
am amazed that…”.
But, as it happens, I
am amazed
that there has been so little critical dissent on the subject of Tom
Stoppard’s
Rock ’N’ Roll.
Alastair Macaulay stands a couple of steps back from the adulation, but
that’s as far as it goes. I have, as it happens, met a number of
people in the past couple of weeks who are as mystified as me that
no-one has dared to say “boo” to this play… and, as it happens, they’re
all practically involved in theatre at very high levels. That’s
not an appeal to authority, but it makes you think, or perhaps ought to.
Stoppard is obviously not in a the same league as, say, Howard Barker
for unremitting density, but he does still convey a slight feeling that
he puts more into his plays than the average punter can comfortably
digest. On this occasion, though, I think he put in more than
he could digest.
Analysing
Let me approach this in an unorthodox way: through the music.
Yes, as various reviewers note, the actual rock ’n’ roll is largely
confined to scene changes, whilst details of the track are projected in
white onto the black curtain (and it seems that things are once again
so strained in the former-Pink Floyd camp that Dave Gilmour and Roger
Waters won’t even be seen together on the same caption).
Nevertheless, the music provides the title of the play, its
superstructure, its core symbol and a central role in the lives of
several of its characters, so I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in
analysing what Stoppard actually does with the music.
To begin with what might seem a point of staggering pedantry: would
anyone in 1971 have referred to Syd Barrett’s "Golden Hair" as being
“track 8” on
The Madcap Laughs?
I don’t think so: they’d have called it the second track on side 2, or
words to that effect. Stoppard has written a Seventies teenager
who speaks the language not of vinyl LPs but of CDs. And this, I
think, is an emblem of the play’s principal weakness: that it pretends
to capture an era but in fact all matters are filtered quite strongly
through modern sensibilities. The sensibilities in question are
those of an age in which communism is commonly held to have
definitively “lost”, in which (as so often throughout history) an
acquiescence in the dominant ideology is interpreted
self-congratulatorily as being a noble absence of ideology, a standing
above that whole arena. But they are also the sensibilities of
Tom Stoppard, the individual: an individual who has written a play
which repeatedly pays homage to Syd Barrett as a rock and
counterculture icon but whose choice of between-scenes music (written
into the script) repeatedly veers instead towards the bloated
self-obsession of later, Roger Waters-era Floyd. (Surely one of
the engines that drove Waters’ bitterness was that his problems were
generally seen as somehow being less heroic than Syd’s.)
Research
Stoppard hasn’t actually done his research, either.
Understandably: it doesn’t occur to many of us that we need
particularly to research rock; we’ve grown up with it. But when
we intend to make so much of something, we really ought to take steps
to ensure that we know what we’re handling. At one point in the
first act, Stoppard’s protagonist Jan is about to put a record on, and
asks his friend Ferdinand whether it should be The Doors or The Fugs,
before making the choice himself in favour of The Doors. This may
be a deliberate choice on Stoppard’s part to underline that Jan’s
interest in rock was for the music rather than any especial
countercultural agenda, but I fear it may also simply be an automatic
assumption that there isn’t much to choose between them. In fact,
The Fugs soon transcended their early folk-rock sound for something
much closer to the Frank Zappa-influenced freak-out music practised by
Jan’s beloved Plastic People Of The Universe: Jan’s natural inclination
would be to listen to The Fugs rather than the Byronic posturing of The
Doors. Just as, when considering moving to Frankfurt in 1971, Jan
would not be stereotypically disparaging of the concept of German rock:
he would be aware that the burgeoning “cosmic music” scene (or
“Krautrock”, as it’s now more generally known) already included the
likes of Can, Faust, Cluster, Popol Vuh… and those are just the major
bands in that region of Germany; I’m refraining from mentioning many
more that were based in or sprang from Berlin. Again, this was
music of the kind that a Plastics fan would instinctively understand.
Yes, you’re quite right: none of this has anything to do with what goes
on in the play. But it should. Should, not from a moral “my
taste is right” standpoint, but because these are not mere details but
are of relevance to Stoppard’s treatment of his material.
Smug
And there’s the big one, of course. Act One ends in 1977; Act Two
begins a decade later. So what happened to punk and its
offshoots? To the nihilism and reaction against all
consensus? To the horrors of New Romanticism, the innovation of
early electro and the beginnings of indie and “college rock”?
What we get are a few seconds of U2’s "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m
Looking For", which offers a brief, rather smug chuckle if it stands as
a comment on the intervening years. But what
I was looking for was some kind of
acknowledgement of the political events of that period as well; the
play is, after all, about the left in Britain as well as the Velvet
Revolution in Czechoslovakia. But no, Brian Cox’s character Max
is as defiantly stuck in his Marxist rut as ever; he’s just
incorporated a few mentions of Thatcher into his outpourings. In
fact, though – and I never believed that I would be granting the mad
old bat this much; I’m holding my nose as I type – there is a case to
be made for the view that she and Reagan laid the foundations for the
sea-change of 1989. I’m not saying that view is right, but surely
in a play like this it ought at least to be acknowledged, to be engaged
with in order to be refuted. But no, it’s as absent from the
picture as the Pistols, Joy Division, The Smiths
et al. from the soundtrack.
Neither those politics nor those musics fit the thesis of the play,
which is one rooted in a conservative paternalism (its happy ending is
symbolised by the Stones… in 1990, for heaven’s sake!) rather than
radicalism of any stripe.
And so I think that Stoppard’s selective, partial and downright sloppy
use of music ought to make one at least question whether there isn’t a
similar flaw in the play’s ideology. I think there is, but the
problem with its reviews is that the point isn’t even questioned.
The review of the play I’d really like to read has, to the best of my
knowledge, yet to be written: it is by Charles Shaar Murray, Britain’s
greatest living rock journalist.
Inspiration
Well, at least I managed to avoid going back to harp once more on the
Cambridge strain, for all that the English scenes of
Rock ’N’ Roll are set there.
But I turn thitherwards now, for a blatantly personal
remembrance. My life in and around theatre has had three
principal catalysts: my grammar-school teacher Robin Glendinning, who
first awakened the dramatic fervour in me; Robert Hewison, Georgina
Brown, Sarah Hemming and Lyn Gardner, who between them gave me all the
initial breaks that built up to the beginnings of a reviewing career,
long before I recognised as much myself; and between them, Val
Widdowson. You’ve almost certainly never heard of him. He
was usually jobless, sometimes homeless, yet an inspiration to several
generations of student actors and directors in Cambridge.
He grew up in the city, attending Cambridge County School for Boys, and
soon became involved in acting both with the likes of Richard Spaul’s
Cambridge Experimental Theatre company and the numerous student
dramatic societies, pre-eminent among them the University’s Amateur
Dramatic Club. By the early 1980s he could regularly be seen in
the ADC Theatre’s bar, and irregularly on stages around the city.
Val had an inclination towards self-destruction. Partly this took
the form of alcohol: as his character notes in James Saunders’ play
Triangle, which became Val’s
signature piece, “I have achieved in the trade a certain notoriety – or
let’s say fame, I don’t want to brag – as a person not unfond of his
bottle. Or anyone else’s.” But he also showed a compulsion
to sabotage his reputation whenever it showed signs of becoming too
great for him to bear: every few years, he would disappear shortly
before he was due to open in a major role. Among those student
directors who suddenly found a Widdowson-sized gap in their cast was
Sam Mendes in that production of
The
Changeling I mentioned a few weeks ago on this page.
Fascinating
Yet when he acted or directed, Val was consummate. Dominic
Dromgoole, now artistic director of Shakeapeare’s Globe and a student
in the early 1980s, recalls, “He once spent about five minutes peeling
an orange, alone on stage, in an intense drama about Joe Orton and
Kenneth Halliwell. It was one of the most fascinating stretches
of acting I have ever witnessed.” As a director, he elicited
remarkable performances from his casts through a mixture of instinctive
psychological work and sheer play.
He showed a fondness for the plays of James Saunders, directing
A Scent Of Flowers,
Bodies and several times
performing
Triangle, an
all-but-solo piece in which a mentally disintegrating actor supposedly
has 20 minutes of material to perform and a 40-minute slot to fill in
front of an audience (in reality, every word is scripted). The
Actor also downs almost half a bottle of whisky in the course of the
play. Although Saunders never intended it, Val insisted on
performing with real whisky; such copious ingestion never interfered
with the power of his performance, except on the one occasion when he
gave the play twice on the same day – the second-house performance (at
which I played the subordinate character of the Prompter) lasted 85
minutes, and his tearful exit was followed by a distinct, unscripted,
man-sized thud from offstage.
And although drink was a refuge for him, he was peerless company on the
way. Few who have ever heard it will forget his story of his old
headmaster teaching
Macbeth:
the man’s teeth whistled on S’s, so when he got to “If
th’assassination/Could trammel up the consequence, and catch/With his
surcease, success…”, dogs would come running from miles around.
Extravagantly
bearded
A spell in Bristol in the mid-1980s was followed by a return to
Cambridge and several months of homelessness during which he slept on a
succession of friends’ floors or on the street. He worked for a
while in an ancillary nursing job at Fulbourn mental hospital, then
re-entered education with a view to working in dramatherapy, but found
it difficult to allow himself to be formally taught skills that he had
long since acquired experientially. In the early 2000s, he
performed a number of solo shows consisting of dramatised readings of
his own and others’ work, usually with the ADC Bar as a formal
venue. He also worked at the theatre’s box office; the last time
I saw him, nearly two years ago, he tested the authenticity of a
ten-pound note proffered by a punter by holding up the portrait of
Charles Darwin on the reverse of the note to compare it with his own
balding and extravagantly bearded visage. (He always wore a beard
of Marxian proportions unless a role had required him to trim or shave
it.) The likeness was astounding; the note passed muster.
Val was nevertheless reclusive in his home life, and it is grimly
unsurprising that, when authorities forced entry into his home for a
gas inspection in April 2006, he was found to have been dead for some
weeks. He died from a gastro-intestinal haemorrhage due to
gastric ulceration, according to the inquest held last week, the report
of which was the first I heard of his passing. He was eleven
years and one day younger than Syd Barrett, and I shall miss him.
Written for Theatre
Record.