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Rolling back distortions

Thursday, November 1, 2007

I’m glad that Rock ‘n’ Roll, from the gifted hand of Sir Tom Stoppard (far left), made it to its New York opening before Broadway’s threatened strike.

Local One, Gotham’s pointed end of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees – “international” in that it has Canadian as well as US members – is now to meet with the theater managements again on November 7th, after hitting a total impasse for the past three weeks. But that’s not as hopeful as it might seem. This new meeting will include representatives of the overall trade union, which is a legal prerequisite to an official strike being authorized; local members have already met and agreed to strike in December - the best month, of course, for Broadway’s ticket sales.

 

Rock 'n' Roll will have worked its magic by then – and maybe the strike (about, as often, staffing levels and work rules) just won’t happen after all. Under Trevor Nunn’s sleek direction the play addresses, aptly enough, the question of what working men and women really want - that slice of humanity that various characters at different points in the play claim as “normal” people. But in true Stoppardian fashion, it embraces much else beside, from the role of rock music in society (and that of creativity in general) to the nature of consciousness and even the soul, to authority and freedom, to the responsibilities of journalism and the dangerous malleability of language, especially political language.

 

That last vital and current issue, of “spin” extending into complete distortion of words and of serious thought, exercised Stoppard a lot during a Times Talks session last week, one of those image-raising and perhaps a little revenue-earning “live events” that The New York Times periodically hosts, in a new theater space now that’s part of its glass-encased, nearing-completion headquarters building.

 

Stoppard was interviewed on stage by John Darnton, the paper’s former Culture Editor, but maybe more significantly here also a former Eastern Europe correspondent - since Rock ‘n’ Roll is set during Czechoslovakia’s struggle up from communism. It covers (with both English and Czech mis-en-scenes) a period stretching from the Prague Spring's liberal stirrings and the crushing Soviet invasion of 1968 through to communism's eventual collapse ... and that curious pinnacle of Czechoslovak freedom and sovereignty, a 1990 performance in Prague’s Spartakiadni Stadium by the Rolling Stones (lead singer above right).

 

 

WHEN I ASKED STOPPARD ABOUT THE FUNCTION of dramatists versus that of journalists (and this was before I saw the play and heard his reporter character dismissing the rock music dimension to Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution as “a think-piece, not a story”) he sought to drive a clear wedge between the two disciplines. But as deliberately flattering and slyly self-deprecating as ever, the playwright also reminded me of his own beginnings in newspapers - “I was not actually a very important journalist; you probably are an important journalist” - and went on to describe the “drama” (yes, drama) of competing with his local town’s other afternoon paper. (That market was Bristol, and Stoppard was right to recall it as a golden era, in the early 1960s, of two rival papers still in business.)

 

Watching the play, I remembered my own early days in local reporting, in the Border region straddling England and Scotland. I was a very young TV correspondent there in 1968, and once covered an international charity work-camp, where volunteer overseas students were digging new ditches for a deprived stretch of Cumberland county. The students included Nadia Bilak, the teenage daughter of Vasil Bilak, who was the hard-line First Secretary of the Slovak Communist Party.

 

At dead of night, two Russian agents arrived at the work-camp and took the girl, bundled her onto a train to London, and then onto an Aeroflot plane to Moscow, where her father was at the time. He had just signed the infamous “invitation” to the Soviets to roll their tanks into the heart of Prague, delivering “fraternal assistance” - in the Kremlin's own phrase, a prime example of the distortion, indeed destruction, of meaningful vocabulary that Stoppard is decrying.

 

Safely twelve hundred miles away, covering the unexpected "Cumberland angle" to this story of - in reality - fratricidal interference, I began seriously learning my trade that night.