Plays

Macbeth

G.K. Chesterton, after seeing Macbeth in 1912, wrote that the production

“gave me, in the middle of a settled and hackneyed story, the electric shock of moral liberty. When Macbeth said ‘We will proceed no further in this business,’ for an instance I thought he wouldn’t—though I have read Macbeth a hundred times. In the midst of life we are in death; in that one dead pageantry, in the midst of death I was in life. I thought for a flash that the play might end differently.”

The brevity and force of Macbeth is often remarked upon, and it is certainly part of achievement of the play, but I do think that Chesterton got at something key; that the tragedy is of free will.

I listened particularly for this line when Moses Dupre and I were taking in Patrick Stewart’s performance at BAM. It was delivered tenuously, quietly, haltingly. Almost as if giving voice to something that needs to be said, but isn’t quite believed. This lack of conviction doesn’t stand a chance when faced with Lady Macbeth’s swift and powerful rejoinder. It was striking, and like Stewart’s performance on the whole, made Macbeth psychologically complex. There was a rich internality to him. Not a goodness, and he didn’t put doubt where wasn’t any, but from the very beginning there was an intelligence to Macbeth which helped to tinge his early soliloquies with foreboding.

Macbeth is of course sorely tested – he must deal not only with a famously pushy wife, but there’s the small matter of [in this case rapping] witches. But both of these forceful presences never fully dominated Macbeth, and when they won out it was because he let them. I thought of an early scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskilnokov has convinced himself that he doesn’t have to go through with his desperate plan:

“Walking across the bridge, he looked calmly and quietly at the Neva, of the bright setting of the bright, red sun. In spite of his weakness, he was not even aware of any fatigue in himself. It was as if an abscess in his heart, which had been forming all that month, had suddenly burst. Freedom, freedom! He was now free of that spell, magic, sorcery, obsession!”

But at that very moment of liberation something is revealed to him that sends him back, which he, like Macbeth, reads as an incontrovertible sign that his fate is sealed. And he enters his apartment…

“like a man condemned to death. He was not reasoning about anything, and was totally unable to reason; but he suddenly felt with his whole being that he never had any freedom whether of mind or of will, and that everything had been suddenly and finally decided.”

This is a terrible situation, but a human one, and there is something terrifyingly recognizable in the tragedy of Macbeth. Sin, after all, is a combination of resignation of will and opportunity. It’s that complicity that Stewart’s performance brought out.



Rock 'N' Roll

“I think the time when music could change the world has passed,” Neil Young recently ruefully announced. I wonder what he would make of Tom Stoppard’s Rock N Roll? Personally, I’m surprised it took Young this long to come to this conclusion. If it wasn’t Woodstock failing to end Vietnam, Farm Aid failing to revive small farms, then it’s his latest album which has failed (as of yet) to end the war in Iraq and impeach President Bush. But I don’t know if there ever was a time when music could change the world, or whether or not that would be a good thing.

This play takes both rock and roll and politics as two of its many subjects. Others include but are not limited to the contrast between theory and practice; material and immaterial identity; compromise and sacrifice, and the apparently, but a little unconvincing to me, haunting presence of Syd Barrett. Interestingly especially for a play that begins in 1968, music and politics are in two different spheres. It’s stranger still for the topic of the play; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent collapse of Communism. For here you do have a movement that I’d imagine Neil Young would be very interested in, as music did seem to matter. The Plastics became a key part of the anti-communist movement in Prague as symbols of the injustices of the Communist regime. And yet they weren’t revolutionaries. They had their principles (one that would be identifiable to Young is their reported refusal to cut their hair) but they did not set out to topple a government. And the Czech character Stoppard follows, Jan, a former doctoral student at Cambridge now back in Prague, is an intellectual, a rock music fan, but who doesn’t seem to be interested in either the subversive messages of his vast record collection, or in the subversive activity of his politically engaged friends in Prague. Unjustly arrested, he is reluctantly and altogether un-heroically brought into the movement that will eventually help to end Communism.

It’s an interesting take, in which dissidence is seen through the eyes of the inactive. And much of the justification for the Communist system is heard through the pontifications of Jan’s former Cambridge advisor hundreds of miles away. This lends the play its ironic humor, and a bit of aloofness. Stoppard is on the whole good at making characters rather than mere sketches. There is an odd and didactic speech towards the end of the play by a Czech émigré in Cambridge about the declining state of the English character which struck me as out of place, and untypical of the sort of observation she would make. But there are more places where things work, especially an extremely moving speech by the professor's wife, who has breast cancer, about being more than her body.

The music that appears in the play, by Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, and in what was certainly the oddest choice, the almost never heard “Chinatown Shuffle” by the Grateful Dead, blares between each scene change, though it seemed to me to function more as a reflection of the passing of time than in creating an atmosphere. It’s a dispassionate use of the music of the 60s and 70s, music which is often used as the soundtrack to sweeping social change. (Here I think of the PBS documentary Domino.) The final scene is of the Rolling Stones playing a concert in a newly liberated Prague in 1990. Our characters rejoice at the opportunity to see this band who before they had only heard on record. Rock music has not ended Communism, nor is this concert seen as the fruit of democracy. It seemed to me that this is but one way in which freedom is experienced, and though perhaps not as important as other changes to the country, as other freedoms that would now be open, it was a kind of simple human pleasure previously outlawed.

But not everyone found this show enjoyable. Making my way up from the bar at intermission I ran headfirst into a gaggle of septuagenarians who were animatedly panning the play as positively unbearable. “But it got good reviews” one said incredulously to the group of bobbing grey heads, hunched shoulders, and thick glasses. The voice got a little stronger and more outraged: “It got good reviews!” Here are the true seeds of revolution.