Taking Sides, and: India Ink (review)

Perhaps as a backhanded warning of what lies ahead for Americans if arts education continues to be cut, playwrights Ronald Harwood and Tom Stoppard have created artistically-impaired American characters for their latest West End productions. Harwood’s Taking Sides, a moral dissection of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler’s (1886–1954) behavior during the Nazi era in his homeland, is deftly directed by Harold Pinter. Stoppard’s Indian Ink, directed by Peter Wood, is a gentle look at a British woman poet’s 1930 pilgrimage to India and its contemporary aftermath for the literary world and her surviving sister.

The pertinent characters in these plays belong to the “ugly American” tradition. Their stereotypical trait is philistinism. Harwood’s American Major (Michael Pennington), charged with interrogating Furtwängler (Daniel Massey) during de-Nazification proceedings, is arrogantly ignorant of the arts. Stoppard’s American professor, purchasing precious publication credits with the true artist’s blood, is a dim dilettante. While neither is a villain on the scale of Jesse Helms, both serve as foils to truly artistic European protagonists. And yet, to be fair, both have the redeeming American virtue of moral earnestness. Harwood’s Major is needed to clean up a post-war Germany fouled by unexpiated Auschwitz crimes. In Indian Ink, Stoppard’s professor Eldon Pike (played with appropriate blandness by Colin Stinton) is a slow-witted pedant, but his footnoting zeal is needed to give the fictitious but representative artist Flora Crewe her due.

Both authors are interested in whittling down blunt stereotypes to draw finer moral lines. Harwood’s Major Steve Arnold is, first of all, admirably played by Pennington, an actor with a well-feigned American accent, cadence, and style. Costumer Tom Rand has clad him in an “I-look-like-Ike” uniform representing crisp order in a post-apocalyptic Germany. The mood of still-smoking ovens is well conveyed by Eileen Diss’s single set, an office with a partially see-through wall revealing a background of bombed out ruins. We first meet Major Arnold in repose in his office chair, listening to a Furtwängler recording of a Beethoven symphony. He’s either rapt in artistic appreciation or, as it turns out, dead asleep. He aggressively resists his German secretary’s educational efforts, proudly proclaiming that he was chosen for this job precisely because of his ignorance of music. He is a former insurance man, a cool statistician of risks and motives who becomes an Inquisitor. And, as Inquisitor, he toys with his victims.

The art-loving German secretary is horrified by the way the Major browbeats artists—be it a shady second violinist (Gawn Grainger), or worse, the Great Conductor himself. The Maestro is played by Massey with a penchant for far-off gazing meant, perhaps, to convey the confusion of the dispossessed. (It is nonetheless unfortunate that Massey’s hairdo and face recall Christopher Lloyd as a mad scientist.) The Maestro’s lingering vertigo is understandable. He has fallen from a great height as Germany’s unofficial official conductor. Now this former “dictator” of orchestras is dictated to by an American who keeps him waiting, tells him where to sit, and doesn’t care how many symphonies Beethoven wrote, just how short they are.

The Maestro’s main source of confusion is the Major’s reluctance to credit a whole chorus of character witnesses on his behalf, including the half-wild wife (Suzanne Bertish) of a murdered Jewish pianist whom Furtwängler had tried to save. Finally, in the scales on the Maestro’s side, Harwood gives us a young American lieutenant who reveres the Great Man. German-born, the young man (Christopher Simon) has nonetheless grown up in America and had a college education. It was attending a concert by Furtwängler while he was still a child in Germany, however, that initiated the lieutenant into the world of art. The death of his parents at Nazi hands, being a Jew himself—neither of these things lessens the young man...