Tom stoppard, p.47
Tom Stoppard, page 47
Mike Hodges took his name off the project. Stoppard felt he had to continue trying to get the best result he could, so he went on patiently “horse-trading”—and clawing back some of his original script. But Hodges never quite forgave him. “I love Tom Stoppard,” he said in 2002, “but he really was naive in this instance…The Americans…were insulting their audience by dumbing it down…Tom should never have compromised.” The US version took its own shape. Channel 4’s UK version, aired on 31 May 1984, was titled “a film by Mike Hodges and Tom Stoppard.” In the end it was not quite as bad as he feared. It won an Emmy, which Stoppard went to LA to collect (without Mike Hodges), and the Critics’ Prize at the Banff TV festival in Toronto. By the end of 1985, the very different US version had still not been aired.
At the time, Stoppard adopted a resigned, ironical tone: “That’s showbiz,” as he said to his parents. It wasn’t lost on him that the historical betrayals and compromises he was writing about were being echoed in the relatively trivial production problems he was having. Still, he found it “as upsetting as any situation I’ve been in as a writer,” and he reproached himself, too, for naivety. He wrote some dismayed pieces about the business, one of them as the introduction to the first Faber edition of Squaring the Circle. “Strewth, what a story,” commented Frank Pike.
Even without the drastic changes imposed by Metromedia, there were big differences between Stoppard’s first, unpublished 1982 script and the published text of 1984, which was (more or less) what was seen on Channel 4. The 1984 version did much more spelling out and explaining (“You won’t understand Poland’s attitude to Russia until you understand some Polish history”). He put in more jokes, like a Russian banker called Finansky. But he did maintain his unreliable approach, for instance giving three different versions of a scene between Wałęsa, Jaruzelski and Archbishop Glemp, or showing us a solid-looking, book-lined room which proves to be a temporary studio set. The character you might want to sympathise with, Kuron, the intellectual radical writer, who foreshadows the romantic revolutionary exiles of The Coast of Utopia, is as fallible as anyone else.
For all its ambiguities, a definite view underlies the film. Stoppard’s own anti-Marxist belief that “theories don’t guarantee social justice, social justice tells you if a theory is any good” is strongly voiced by the narrator, who calls, as Stoppard so often does, on a child’s view to prove his point: “Right and wrong are not complicated—when a child cries, ‘That’s not fair!’ the child can be believed.” And the narrator spells out the play’s essential premise:
Between August 1980 and December 1981 an attempt was made in Poland to put together two ideas which wouldn’t fit, the idea of freedom as it is understood in the West, and the idea of socialism as it is understood in the Soviet empire. The attempt failed because it was impossible, in the same sense as it is impossible in geometry to turn a circle into a square with the same area—not because no one has found out how to do it, but because there is no way in which it can be done.
The struggles of Solidarity, Havel’s incarceration and the continuing injustices and repressions in Czechoslovakia kept his mind close to Eastern Europe all through the 1980s. He became deeply involved with the cause of the “refuseniks,” the Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel and elsewhere, who were treated as “outcasts from Soviet society” if they applied for visas. They were sacked, demoted and attacked, and mostly denied permission or left in limbo. An international campaign was being mounted on their behalf, especially in the States. The cause seemed to him a morally crucial one, bound up as it was with human rights and freedom of choice. His own childhood history underlay his involvement—though, in the 1980s, in spite of the memoir he asked his mother to write in 1981, her history was still obscure to him.
His strongest motive for involvement was his horror of Soviet Communism and a deep sense of injustice. In 1983 he opened a Soviet Jewry exhibition at the House of Commons. A few years later, in 1986, he wrote a piece for the Daily Mail—not his favourite outlet, but he wanted to reach a big audience—about the KGB’s cynical release of the mathematician Anatoly Shcharansky to the West, after years of imprisonment and harassment. Though Shcharansky’s release was a cause for celebration, behind him stood “an immense column of refuseniks who are trying to follow him out.” On 17 February 1986, he organised a dawn-to-dusk vigil on the South Bank, a roll call for Soviet Jews who had applied for and been refused visas of emigration from Russia. (The event led to an award for services to Soviet Jewry in July that year.) Nine thousand refusenik names were read out—a fraction of those who had applied for visas—and as each name was uttered, a red carnation was thrown onto the courtyard outside the National Theatre. He wrote to all the well-known people he could think of to get their participation. Piers Paul Read was one of many who received a formal invitation to come and stand outside the National Theatre. Stoppard told him that more than a hundred “public figures” would read out the names, and that there would be big coverage of the event. The celebrity readers included David Owen, David Steel, Ken Livingstone, Neil Kinnock, Ronnie Corbett, Melvyn Bragg and Twiggy. The Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg, who had begun his friendship and working relationship with Stoppard on The Real Thing and was a supporter of Israel, flew over from New York with Senator Bill Bradley, famous American basketball player turned politician. Why was he making the trip? Manny Azenberg asked Bradley. Bradley replied: “One, it’s good politics; Two, I believe in the cause; Three, I’ll be having dinner with Tom Stoppard.”
Stoppard’s involvement in Cold War anti-Communist activities strengthened his links to Margaret Thatcher (a great heroine to most Czech and Russian dissidents at the time), whom he invited to take part in the roll call. She declined, as she felt it would “weaken her ability to assist Soviet Jewry,” but told him she sympathised “very much” with the cause. Another who declined was Isaiah Berlin. He told Stoppard that his sympathy with the cause was total, but that with painful regret he had to refuse to be publicly critical of the Soviet Union because he had living relatives there, and could cause them harm.
His pro-Jewish and anti-Soviet activities did not go down well with his parents. Ken Stoppard had become increasingly xenophobic as he got older, and very much disliked his famous adopted son campaigning for Russian Jews. Bobby, as always, wanted a quiet safe life, for herself and for him. She had put her life in Eastern Europe behind her long ago, and she was anxious that his high profile might put him at risk. And she disagreed with his position. “Tomáš,” her complaint would run—in his paraphrase of it—“don’t you realise most people are happy in Czechoslovakia? They don’t know they’re living in this prison society you’re talking about. We’ve got to England. Don’t make waves.”
Out of kindness and tact, he muted these activities in his letters to her. In February 1980, for instance, when he took part in a re-creation of a Czech dissenter’s trial in Munich, he only mentioned it in passing, “because you don’t like my getting too ‘involved.’ ” But their disagreement came to a head with the 1986 roll call event, and, for once, he spelt out his arguments, in one of the most challenging letters he ever wrote to her.
About the Soviet thing—I really hate upsetting you, but I suppose not quite enough to override my own arguments for doing it. I could have told you two months ago but what’s the point?—it would only worry you for 2 extra months. I agree with most of what you say—I would even put in extra arguments, eg a Russian Jew is infinitely better off than half the population of half the countries one reads about—Africa, Latin America, Haiti, S.E. Asia, etc, etc. AND there certainly are plenty of things in the “West” which are far from wonderful…and millions of Russians, including Jews, live perfectly reasonable lives without the slightest desire to change them—none of this is news to me. On the other hand, Russia, unlike Haiti, etc, is one of the great and powerful nations which, like America and Europe, considers that it represents a norm and a standard and a type of society which aspires to be a model for the world in general…so it merits scrutiny just as Britain or France or America do, but in the latter case the scrutiny can come from within—abuses are frequent and widespread but at least they are a) acknowledged as abuses, ie the system going wrong and b) subject to examination by press and TV and c) subject to correction by the law of the land. But in Russia the abuses are a) the system working as designed b) not subject to examination or criticism and c) not subject to law because the legislature is not separated from the government as it is in the West…so I think it’s right to “interfere.”
Now—your main point is: let someone else do it, not Tom. Why? (apart from the fact that I hardly ever do anything anyway). You don’t really think the Russians are going to shoot me?! And if I thought there was the remotest chance of your cousin’s children or anybody else in Cz. getting into disfavour I really would keep my head down (Isaiah Berlin and Nureyev both have mothers in Russia and quite rightly never do anything political) but even the Communists don’t blame anyone for the actions of a second cousin who left the country at the age of 18 months! Havel…is much more likely to get a backlash as someone connected with me.
…You seem to say that I don’t “need the recognition” but I can’t believe you think I’m doing it for that—I dislike having my name in the papers and try not to except when I owe it to a producer of my plays. The fact is that…you have no idea how bad things can be and if they were happening to Fiona you would be on the South Bank yourself! I’ve been lucky all my life, it almost makes me believe in the stars, and the way I can live, including O, B, W & E, really begins with that fate making me an “English writer” instead of a Czech one, and I don’t think one should necessarily take it for granted and get on with one’s own life and say hard luck to everyone else.
I’m a bit confused as to your other argument. Are you saying that there’s an anti-foreign streak in English society and I shouldn’t keep reminding people that I wasn’t born at the age of eight in Retford?? I’ve never found the English like that, the opposite if anything.
I keep telling journalists that my being born in Cz. is irrelevant to all this, which is true in the sense that I feel English and love England and have not an iota of feeling transplanted (although I have an enormous nostalgia for India)—it’s odd really. I have no emotional feeling for Europe at all, and it’s almost arbitrary that I involve myself a bit in Czechs and Russia etc—except that I do think Communism is anti-human. I know it intellectually not emotionally.
…You know I love you and it upsets me to upset you—I’ll keep my head down now for a couple of years. It’s not a way I like to spend my time, it’s a sort of occasional necessary nuisance which I think I owe to my good luck.
19
The Real Thing
To speak of being familiar with a loved one is a contradiction in terms…Lovers should be referred to as constant unfamiliars…
Max, an architect, is sitting alone, building a house of cards. His wife, Charlotte, an art dealer, comes home. The door slams, the house of cards collapses. “It’s me,” she announces. She has been on a trip to Switzerland, and brings him back a present. Max needles and quizzes her. She sees there is something wrong. He tells her he has been through her things and found her passport. He assumes she has been unfaithful. His questioning of her is witty and sardonic, congratulating her on the inventiveness of her fake airport presents, guessing at the number of lovers she has. She tells him there is a right thing to say if only he could think of it. She is sorry he’s had a bad time, but he has done everything wrong.
Max: Is it anyone I know?
Charlotte: You aren’t anyone I know.
And she leaves, shutting the door behind her. He gets out her present. It’s an Alpine snow globe. He shakes it and the snowstorm fills the stage.
In the next scene, Henry, a playwright, is preparing his appearance on Desert Island Discs, rather despairingly, since he’s supposed to be a brilliant intellectual, but the only music he really likes is 1960s pop songs. (“I’m going to look a total prick, aren’t I, announcing that while I was telling Jean-Paul Sartre and the post-war French existentialists where they had got it wrong, I was spending the whole time listening to the Crystals singing ‘Da Doo Ron Ron.’ ”) His wife, Charlotte, an actor, treats him sharply. Max and his wife, Annie, also both actors, come to call. In the foursome that follows, we get two revelations. First, quite quickly, that Max and Charlotte are the actors playing “Max” and “Charlotte” in Henry’s play, House of Cards, which is what we were watching in Scene One. And that Charlotte is not enjoying the run of the play, since in her view Henry can’t write parts for women. (“ ‘Fancy a drink?’ ‘Let me get you a drink.’ ‘Care for a drink?’ That’s Henry’s idea of women’s parts.”) Second, once the others are out of the room, making “dips” for drinks, that Henry and Annie are having an affair, and are poised on the verge of giving their secret away. Annie wants to—she is rash and passionate—and Henry doesn’t, in case it turns out not to be the real thing. Two offstage characters are talked about. One is Henry and Charlotte’s daughter, Debbie, a punkish, horse-loving teenager. The other is Annie’s good cause, a Scottish soldier called Brodie, whom she met on a train and who’s been sent to prison for burning a wreath on the Cenotaph as an anti-cruise-missiles gesture. A protest movement is growing around him. Max and Annie are moved by his story, Henry and Charlotte are not.
The Real Thing turns and turns these relationships and configurations around, as in a hall of mirrors. To put it simply: the playwright leaves the actress he is married to, who is acting in his play as the wife suspected of infidelity, and goes to live with another actress, who is married to the actor who is playing the man in the playwright’s play who suspects his wife of infidelity.
Stoppard’s version of La Ronde spins round as follows. Max finds out that Annie is betraying him with Henry—while Henry’s Desert Island Discs programme is playing on the radio—and she leaves him. The play is as ruthless with Max as Annie is: we don’t see him on stage again. Henry and Annie set up together, at first in bliss. He is trying to write a play for her to star in, as Charlotte starred in his last play. She is acting in Strindberg’s Miss Julie. He speaks with delight of being in love, but seems not quite in love enough for her, or not enough to be jealous, or to stop fancying other women.
Two years later they are still together. Henry hasn’t written his play for her; he is writing a blockbuster sci-fi film script to pay off his alimony bills. Annie is acting in a Jacobean tragedy of incest and passion, Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, with a young actor called Billy, who has fallen for her, and for whom she develops a tendresse. She also wants Henry to draw attention back to Brodie’s cause by doctoring his agitprop play and getting it put on. In response, Henry performs a big speech, with cricket bat, on the difference between good and bad writing.
There is a scene between Henry and Charlotte, cynically tolerant friends now, in which Charlotte tells him she had nine lovers during their marriage, as she thought he wouldn’t care. (“It used to bother me that you were never bothered…By the time I realised you were the last romantic it was too late.”) There is a scene with Debbie, about to leave home at seventeen with a fairground musician, who is scornfully unromantic about sex and, though fond of her father, impatient with his rhetoric and his views. (These two scenes started as separate entities, and then got merged into one.)
In a mirror image of the two earlier scenes of betrayal between “Max” and “Charlotte” and Max and Annie, Henry waits for Annie to come home from Glasgow, where she’s been playing Ford’s incestuous lover with Billy. (We have seen Annie and Billy meeting on the train to Glasgow, in an echo of the first scene of Brodie’s play, and we see them rehearsing their love scene in ’Tis Pity.) Henry has gone through her things, because he thinks she may be unfaithful to him. He is feeling the betrayal which “Max” was so witty about in House of Cards, and which Annie put Max through when she left him for Henry.
Annie and Billy act in the TV film of Brodie’s play, rewritten, as Annie requested, by Henry. She carries on a relationship of a kind with Billy, but stays with Henry: she assures him that she loves him and that he is not replaceable. He is jealous, in love and in pain. In the last scene, Brodie finally turns up, awkward and ungrateful, to watch his TV play in their house. He doesn’t think much of the rewrite. (“I lived and put my guts into it, and you came along and wrote it clever.”) Annie reveals that his political act had never been a real protest, just an attempt to attract her attention. Insulting and insulted, he leaves, a misfit in this play to the end. As Annie and Henry are about to go to bed, Max phones to tell Henry he has found a new love. The pop music that marks every scene plays us out on “I’m a Believer.” We’re left supposing—and hoping?—that Henry and Annie’s love will survive and they will stay together. Stoppard would say: “I think that the right two people found each other, and will sort of survive.” But he would also say that perhaps it was appropriate “to end on a note of suspension.”
