Monthly Archives: April 2008

Stoppard’s Rock and Roll and Every Good Boy Deserves Favor

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Recently, I had the lucky chance to go see an early work of Stoppard’s, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, playing for one night in New York city in a combined effort from Boston University’s theatre and orchestra department. An unusual play, Stoppard created it in 1977 at the request of a friend and composer André Previn. Because it requires a full orchestra, it is rarely staged.

It tells the story of Alexander, put into a lunatic asylum in Soviet Russia for critiquing the Soviet Union, and Alexander, his truly insane cellmate who happens to have the same name. Alexander the lunatic “has an orchestra,” which is what he conducts throughout the political drama to mirror the rising and falling tensions. The orchestra, in this instance situated on the stage, follows his commands. He even interacts with his imaginary players, walking between them and yelling at individuals. Stoppard plays up the comedic aspect of the asylum, the hypocritical political system, and the unexpected dénouement fully. Also, a hint of the bizarre, akin to the huge cat in tails in Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia, appears at the end, in the form of a Magistrate on stilts who towers over the two Alexanders during their questioning. This short play did not lack for clever moments, plays and counterplays of action especially, but the dialogue was sparser that Stoppard’s fully developed style, the settings, characters, action all simpler, and the political critique decidedly pronounced.

The use of music begs comparison with Stoppard’s show currently on Broadway, Rock and Roll. I failed to comment on Stoppard’s use of music in a previous post on this play. Rock and Roll’s blasting interludes and Every Good Boy’s full orchestral score are both atmospheric and also closely related to distinct actions or individuals feelings. Rock and Roll neatly divides the play when moments reach an emotional crescendo. Additionaly, the type of music very effectively grounds the audience in a specific time, place and intellectual outlook. Forget that you never heard of The Plastic People of the Universe (a Czech rock band that acquired political overtones when they were repressed) because taken together with the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd you come to understand it signifies youth and change and rebellion. This underground Czech group are held up as an ideal of resistance to Communism by one character. The PPU and all other music in Rock and Roll contrast with the music of Every Good Boy not merely because one is rock and the other classical.

In Rock and Roll, Stoppard appropriates real music from the era he portrays, and in doing so lends veracity as well as nostalgia to his take on the aftermath of the Prague Spring. On the other, a score is invented to keep up with a playwright and a madman’s imaginination, rendering a unreal atmosphere to a charged political drama. The topsy-turvy music and the politics of the insane asylum in general highlight and critique Soviet government as illogical and absurd system.

Rock and Roll’s music, with all the veracity of authenticity and its loud volume, remains comfortably distant and in the past. Not only does Every Good Boy’s music not feel dated, it feels quite immediate and relevant. An interestingly unexpected effect, as Every Good Boy is further in the past and also has the effect of unreality. In different and surprising ways, Stoppard use music to great significance in both works. To return to a theme in such a different way is striking: Rock and Roll as the more mature treatment of themes of Every Good Boy deserves favor with their similar critique of Soviet suppression and emotional depth as well as the interaction of the individual with the state and with the media.

Great Theft

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Art theft is rarely sordid, rarely violent. It is, in fact, a rarified and cultured kind of crime, one that every aesthete, in the darkest cockles of their hearts, admires. That lusty feeling that seeps into one’s bones as everyone else passes on like shadows while you stare at that thing—that marvelous thing—that seems to have sprung like Athena fully formed from your head, that feeling if why art is stolen. Sure, you might cry, but what about money? What thief could care less about the cold, hard cash a thing is worth?

Exemplia Gratis: Stephen Breitweiser. This young (not to mention, rather attractive) Frenchman lived in his mother and worked as a waiter for 10 years. He and his girlfriend often went on weekend trips to the ancient castles and house museums of Europe. Meanwhile, he was was collecting, via duplicitous mean, 16th and 17th century European masterpieces. In 2001, he was caught attempting to steal a bugle, one of only three like it in the world and with an estimated value of £45,000, in Switzerland. But it was only when he came back two days later to try again that he was arrested.

In his trial, he admitted to stealing 238 artworks. Why? According to Wikipedia, he said at his trial, “”I enjoy art. I love such works of art. I collected them and kept them at home.” Despite the enormity of his collection, he was still able to recall every piece he stole. He interrupted the lengthy reading of his collection during his trial several times to correct various details.” What more noble motive for theft than a love of beauty. The illguarded, barely visited museums dotting Europe have their share of visitors no doubt, but who loved those pieces as he did. The desire to posses each one must have been an all-consuming passion. How often does an indivudal fully realize one’s passions? His success ought to be commended and held forth as exemplary.

Instead, Breitwieser was given a 26-month prison sentence. While that is the unfortunate outcome of gambling with society’s laws, the real loss—and no doubt the one the Stephen himself felt most—was the loss of the paintings. Over 60 paintings, including masterpieces by Brueghel, Watteau, Francois Boucher, and Corneille de Lyon were chopped up by Breitwieser’s mother, Mireille Stengel, in what police believe was an effort to remove incriminating evidence against her son. And really, for such a man, is that in itself not punishment enough?

Even more laudable is the theif’s attitude toward the whole debaucle. Capitalizing on his capture and new-found notoriety, he wrote a book.

Stoppard’s Rock and Roll: loosening the intellectual wrappings of the heart

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Being a Stoppard devotee, I naturally saw Rock and Roll this winter. (And really, how often is it one lives in the same time as a favorite author?) My companion and I greatly enjoyed it, though it didn’t leave me crying for a lost era as I walked out as it did for her. A difference of 30 or so years shows sometimes. Following on the heels of the New York staging of the epic Coast of Utopia trilogy, Rock and Roll took a narrower subject and cast of characters, foregoing intellectual wordplay (a bit!.. relative term with Stoppard…) to take on a bit more emotional depth.

Although dealing with politics and media and how the individual relates to them, the attention given to character’s lives was more holistic that a mere examining of ideas through character’s words. For example, Max’s dogmatic Marxism in the wake of mounting evidence against it via the Prague Spring and his pupil Jan’s experience with it is explored through typically clever Stoppardian dialogue, but it is also shown as more feelingly as the disillusionment of the central tenant of his life at the end. By this point, Max has lost his beloved wife to cancer and has a new relationship, signaling that life goes on even as it does not replace what was. Similarly, the most moving moment of the play came through in a very simple and emotional statement that deigned to treat the division of body and soul with Descartian reasoning. When, in what one gathered was a long-standing difference, Max and his wife discussed this, his wife, dying of cancer, cries out “I am my body,” in an emotive appeal for him to understand she loves him with her body and the tragedy of her losing her very self.

The directness of such a moment stands in contrast to what one consider typical of Stoppard. Brilliant, verbose, intellectual, playful, ambiguous: none of these adjectives apply to such a moment. Rock and Roll has a few such moments that dismiss intellectual wordplay. One began to see this in the operatic trilogy preceding it with its intertwined human relations and it comes out more clearly here. These moments remind me of some of the author’s very early work, typically blunter in its commentary on politics and humanity. Here, such heavy-handedness is turned into a gentler examining of human lives in the specific contexts of politics that originally interested Stoppard, but with more allowance for ambiguity. This ambiguity is no longer chased after by polysyllabic words, but by people who offer greater heart in their confrontation of life. As if he is loosing the intellectual wrappings of the heart, Stoppard matures in greater playwright even as his audience can no longer depend on an evening at marveling at cleverness as their minds are fully engaged. More than intellect is necessary for what I predict we have to look forward to.