A BLAST FROM THE PAST TO INSPIRE OR IRRITATE
By the interval I used to be mournfully unconvinced that there was any level in any respect in reviving Tom Stoppard’s 17-year-old play , about Communist beliefs and philosophical betrayals in Cambridge and Prague 1968-1990 – all mirrored by a younger male obsession with rock and roll albums and the Velvet Underground. The background story is price telling: the Prague Spring, Charter 77, the rolling-in of Soviet tanks, dissident heroism , the ascent to Presidency of an precise playwright, Vaclav Havel. It is near Stoppard’s personal heritage and deeply felt. I wished to see it, having held a candle within the treet as a pupil in 1969 in tribute to Jan Palach’s suicide and since made the liberal’s pilgrimage to Wenceslas Square.
But Lord, regardless of Nina Raine’s deft path and a few fantastic performances, the primary half each drags and – in case you have been round within the late 60s – irritates. Those intelligent but compliant and usable ladies, nonetheless in awe of the boys! That shaggy Syd Barrett determine fascinating them along with his panpipes! Those self-important philosophical debates about whether or not the thoughts is simply the mechanism of the mind , or the important battle of worldwide Marxism versus Czech nationalist socialism, and whether or not to aspect with Havel or Milan Kundera! It felt prehistoric, irrelevant, self indulgent, frankly uninteresting.
Never thoughts. What retains you there and will get you again after the interval are the characters, all completely proven: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as earnest Jan is patronized by Nathaniel Parker’s peppery self-righteous Communist believer Max: Jan goes again to Czechoslovakia to be a part of the dissident motion, which is heroic, whereas Max stays in uxorious tutorial consolation along with his dying classicist spouse – Nancy Carroll, as ever, magnificent as Eleanor, sharply conscious of the scholar Lenka who eyes up her husband. Jan in Prague suffers for his patriotic perception that socialism can have a human face, Max stays unwilling to confess the crushing cruelties of the Soviet Union and thinks solely of ‘the workers’ (who’re completely absent from the play, and I doubt Max personally even helps the ladies with the washing up).
There are as standard some fantastic Stoppardian insights into the psychology of our settled outdated Land (it’s nonetheless the 70s, bear in mind) just like the remark that whereas for snug individuals like us, freedom simply means “leave me alone” whereas for the plenty it means “give me a chance!”. Meanwhile the post-Christian angst about whether or not there’s a soul tangles up with the middle-common-room politics of socialism, whereas the Pan-like determine of a Syd Barrett (Brenock O”Connor, somewhat sensible) scampers round bashing a guitar as a result of as soon as individuals surrender on faith they want a little bit of thriller to spice life up. There is little sense of the fact of human sufferings of the time, past the key police smashing up all Jan’s albums. Except the Beach Boys.
But after the interval, reward God, it comes good and strikes quicker. Years have rolled on, Nancy Carroll is now taking part in the lifeless Eleanor’s hippyish daughter, divorced from a ghastly journalist and nonetheless dreaming in regards to the Pan-figure “a beautiful boy, as old as music, half goat…we were all beautiful then”. Jan, older and sadder after jail, twelve years enforced labour and his nation’s climb into freedom, is again on a go to to the outdated parlour-Stalinist Max. Who nonetheless has “nothing to defend” and stays dismissive of the ladies he makes use of (“take a woman to bed, don’t take a woman to bed, it’s the same”).
Jan has a revelation for him: they have been, to some extent, within the police-state years every betraying the opposite. In an amusingly hideous Cambridge-academic method the characters – plus the terrible journalist’s much more terrible columnist spouse – are all to satisfy for a fish pie meal . Lenka the scholar has grown up and stayed secure in Cambridge to learn Sappho and sneer about our British “democracy of obedience and apology”. But the story is accomplished, because the century creeps to its finish, with a form of acceptance of the laziness of the dual ‘60s simplifications – make-love-not-war and workers-of-the-world-unite . There are just a few sharp traces about trendy journalism, that are true. One transferring love story is accomplished, and so are two somewhat much less inspiring ones.
So not sorry I went. But I’d take an axe to a few of the first-half dialogue.
field workplace hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 Jan
score 3
