A Great Artist’s Career in Anti-communism By Kyle Smith
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-great-artists-career-in-anti-communism/
A rare voice of sanity in the theater, Tom Stoppard vigorously rebuked and lampooned the most monstrous idea of his time.
I f the Left can be reduced to a word, it is “utopianism.” Seeking to perfect man, progressives can never be satisfied with the state of things. To be a progressive means consistently to overlook undeniable progress — decreased poverty, for instance, or enhanced opportunity for minorities of all kinds — while insisting that everything is still terrible and calling for redoubling the fight with huge new injections of funding and ever-expanding bureaucracies.
By contrast, our greatest living playwright, Tom Stoppard, makes a Chestertonian case for accepting our gifts and muddling through. The director Mike Nichols once called him “the only writer I know who is completely happy.” Conservatism at its core rejects ideology — it is what is left behind when the grand schemes collapse and people just get on with it.
In the other direction, the revolutionary one, lies catastrophe. As recounted in Hermione Lee’s impressively wide-ranging new biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, Stoppard’s most successful work this century is the nine-hour trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), the sprawling story of the mid-19th-century radicals and intellectuals, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who contemplated how Russian society should be reformed after the last tsar. The work is an ingenious way of reviewing the greatest human disaster of all time, the Communist debacle, by considering its ideological conception.
Bakunin, a proto-Bolshevik, argues in the play for a maximalist approach that starts with a vengeful spree against the ruling class; but Stoppard’s sympathies clearly lie with the meliorism of Herzen, who pleads “to open men’s eyes and not to tear them out. To bring what’s good along with them.” Herzen’s final speech, which Stoppard took almost verbatim from an 1855 essay, cautions against the folly of the “ancient dream” of “a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way toward it, we won’t be grown up as human beings.”
Stoppard, nearly alone in his industry, resolutely made the case against communism and utopianism, from the Seventies on into this century. His having been right about communism isn’t why he’s an essential artist — and right-wing artists can be hacks too — but the virtue of his convictions gives his plays a satisfying heft to go along with their famous wit, effervescence, and undergraduate vigor.
Most of Stoppard’s work can be fully appreciated only in the rare setting of live performance, but the plays he wrote directly for radio can be enjoyed anywhere, since the BBC has just issued the lot (plus audio adaptations of several written for the stage or TV) as an audiobook. (These are full-on dramatic productions featuring such actors as Hugh Grant, Peggy Ashcroft, and Bill Nighy, and at 15 bucks for 14 plays they’re the bargain of the year.) One play in the collection, Professional Foul (1977), combines politics with ethics, philosophy, and subterfuge in a story about an English academic who, on a visit to a conference in communist Czechoslovakia, is asked to smuggle out a treatise and publish it in the West. The play is both a Hitchcockian suspenser and a cry against the suppression of ideas in the communist bloc, and Stoppard dedicated it to his friend and intellectual doppelgänger, the playwright Václav Havel. Havel, who would later become the first president of a free Czechoslovakia, was repeatedly imprisoned during the communist period for promulgating thoughts considered dangerous by the regime.
Given the dramatic reversals of Stoppard’s early life (he and the rest of his Jewish family, the Sträusslers, first fled the Germans in Czechoslovakia, then the Japanese in Singapore, where his father was killed, and were living in India when his widowed mother met a British officer named Ken Stoppard), the playwright frequently weighed how his life might have turned out had he grown up in his native land and suffered a lifetime under the Soviet bootheel.
After Soviet tanks crushed a Czech uprising in 1968, Stoppard became increasingly dedicated to speaking out about the oppression back home. He frequently wrote and lectured in behalf of dissidents such as the Soviet political prisoner Viktor Fainberg, who was held for six years in a prison–mental hospital after demonstrating in Moscow against the 1968 crackdown, and in 1976 he campaigned for the release of another Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky. Under international pressure, the Soviets did release Bukovsky later that year, and he came to London. Such cases drove Stoppard to write a satirical play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, about the Soviet conflation of demands for freedom with insanity. (A Soviet doctor gravely informs a patient/prisoner, “Your opinions are your symptoms. Your disease is dissent.”) When Bukovsky attended a rehearsal of the play dramatizing his plight, the actor who played the character he inspired, Ian McKellen, became so choked up with emotion that he found it difficult to proceed.
Stoppard became a star spokesman for the Charter 77 movement that grew into the Velvet Revolution, which toppled the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia twelve years later, sometimes speaking in Havel’s stead when his friend was forbidden to travel. In 1977 he also spent a week meeting with dissidents inside the USSR, including Andrei Sakharov. A month after Stoppard’s visit with dissident Volodya Borisov, the Soviets freed him from prison, though he would later be re-incarcerated. Upon departing the Soviet Union, Stoppard was carrying letters from dissidents’ wives, which he managed to retain by moving them from one pocket to another while authorities searched him. On commission from The New York Review of Books, Stoppard went to Prague to write a long piece on conditions inside Czechoslovakia, and some of the dark jokes he heard there made it into his plays. “Question: Why do cops go about in threes? Answer: One can read, one can write, and the third is there to keep an eye on the bloody intellectuals,” is in Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), a play about performing Shakespeare under the all-seeing eye of a police state that Stoppard dedicated to Pavel Kohout, a dissident Czech playwright who staged underground adaptations of Macbeth in living rooms after the state banned him from the theater.
In his 2006 play Rock ’n’ Roll, which is set during the two decades following the 1968 Prague Spring, Stoppard made the case for how even nonpolitical popular art could chip away at an oppressive regime. At a time when the West was in thrall to the idea that the preening of its rock musicians was “subversive” or “rebellious,” Stoppard wrote about a Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose members’ arrest and conviction in 1976 (on grounds of “organized disturbance of the peace,” though their lyrics were not political) helped create the popular movement that undermined communist regimes and turned up the international pressure on them. Stoppard shows that regimes corrupt language by preventing things from being called by their proper names — “giving new meanings to words is how systems lie to themselves,” his play’s Czech protagonist, Jan, remarks, in a statement whose broad applicability far beyond the Soviet era is obvious. Jan (who spent some formative years in England before returning to communist Czechoslovakia) defends English freedoms in a debate with an unrepentant communist professor (modeled on Eric Hobsbawm) who comes off looking silly in his attempts to frame Western life as oppressed. The play shines a light on communism’s strangulation of even life’s most banal pleasures, while exposing the Westerners who shrugged at authoritarian outrages right on their doorstep in the middle of Europe and the useful idiots of the intellectual class in places such as the University of Cambridge who never stopped defending communism as a noble cause. Stoppard became friends with Hobsbawm while writing the play, always eager to hash things out with the aggressively wrong.
Stoppard once said his favorite one-liner was Christopher Hampton’s quip: “I’m a man of no convictions. At least, I think I am.” That was clever but facetious. For most of Stoppard’s life (he was born in 1937), the most important question confronting the world was communism. In every sphere, from literature to the movies, for more than a century, a fair number of cultural leaders have proven supportive or forgiving of, or at best neutral on, communism, almost invariably given to downplaying how communism destroys freedom, human rights, even truth. For every 100 public denunciations of fascism by prominent artists over the past century, you will be lucky to find even one denunciation of communism, fascism’s even more lethal cognate. And you’d be hard-pressed to name a great artist, in any medium, who rebuked communism more stylishly than Tom Stoppard.
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