Pink Floyd, Perestroika, and the Proletariat

Are things in this world changed by only those who set out to change them?  What of those people, those groups, those institutions that inadvertently have disrupted and even overturned societies, when all they wanted to do was live in peace?  These are the questions asked by Tom Stoppard’s new work, Rock ‘n Roll. Per his usual, his queries exist in the form of insanely complex, yet playful dialogue spoken by insanely complex, yet playful characters.  Departing from his recent epic which focused on Russian intellectuals who could do nothing but discuss the political climate of the world, Stoppard places at the center of his new play the character Jan, who doesn’t have much interest in where his country (Czechoslovakia) is heading.  He cares about listening to his music and writing about it without getting arrested.  He’s not a revolutionary- he would have had no place next to the philosophy-spouting indealists of Coast of Utopia; yet he is the crux of Stoppard’s discussion about Czech revolt and struggle. 

Against Jan Stoppard pins Max, an intellectual who makes the study of communism and proletariat revolt his life’s work, and Ferdinand, a member of the Czech resistance to the Fasco-communist regime of Husek.  A series of shouted battles ensue between Jan and each of his intellectual opponents throughout at 20-year span, during which the audience’s sympathy bounces between each of the characters’ struggles.  We want Jan to be able to hear his music.  We want Max to be able to live in a utopic world with square-jawed laborers and buxom ladies wearing kerchiefs.  We want Ferdinand’s letters to convince the Czech government to relax its policies of “normalization.”  So who wins? Who winds up changing history? If you’ve seen Stoppard before, you can guess- nobody wins…maybe.  Change happens, but neither Jan’s rock music nor Ferdinand’s letters makes it so.  Sure, there is the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and Charter 77, but as Max states in the final scene, those are cultural revolutions.  People’s day-to-day lives are no different from them.  Or are they?  Do we really ever change things, no matter if change is our aim or not?  Does history plunge forward, unaware of those of us yelling from the sidelines telling it to stop and turn left instead of right?  Yes, it does. It may take notice once in a while, but it never slows down to say so. And that is the tragedy.  That is the struggle of each of the characters in Rock. They all are searching for something, real or imaginary, in their past- something that has been taken from them by the progress of history. 

    

But what do they want? Enter Stoppard’s main theme, it’s binding element: the Pink Floyd song “Vera.”  This plays in between the final scenes: “Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?/Remember how she said that /We would meet again /Some sunny day?/Vera! Vera!/What has become of you?/Does anybody else here/Feel the way I do?”  Suddenly it all makes sense. Syd Barret’s character as the “great god pan” has his meaning revealed.  He is Floyd’s “Vera Lynn,” the part of their past that they miss the most.  It turns out, all of Stoppard’s characters have their Veras.  Jan’s “Vera” is the Plastic People, Max’s is Marx, and Ferdinand’s is Havel.   All of Stoppard’s characters, who throughout the play fought for so many different things for so many different reasons, really just all want to go home. To their version of home.  And in the end, somehow, Stoppard gets them all there by the final scene- wiser than we found them at the opening of the curtain, and most definitely happier.  As for Stoppard? I say to him: I hope that we meet again, some sunny day.