Maybe the elephants scrawled on the walls in the crumbling Latvian ‘apartments’ – three living rooms flanked by a communal kitchen and bathroom – hold some clue as to why this rather thin evocation of 1960s-70s cultural-cum-sexual revolution, as experienced in a Soviet socialist republic, works somehow.

Given ‘elephants never forget’ and the ‘elephant in the room’ syndrome, our nostalgia for those happy hippy days long gone prompts the question, how come humanity failed so badly to give peace a chance? When, in the most upbeat scene of the night, a pantomime elephant frolics through the set emblazoned with the psychedelic-bright messages ‘Flower Power’ and ‘Make Love Not War’, I find the accompanying track choice strange: a lively live recording of ‘Bye Bye Love’ (from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 Bridge Over Troubled Waters album, I think). In retrospect, I suppose it is used as a premonition that this communal love-fest won’t last.  

The glib thing to say would be that it takes three and a quarter hours to show us how the world as we knew it was turned upside down and some didn’t survive. And Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll explores the role of Rock in confronting communism in less time with a smaller cast in an infinitely richer theatrical experience. But comparisons can be odious.* Stoppard uses dialogue, for a start, which gives us access to so much more intellectual and emotional dimension and subtlety, although it is limited to those who understand the chosen language.

Sound of Silence is a dialogue-free series of vignettes that lightly sketches the era. It is “about the youth of our parents, about the time when we were conceived,” according to the programme blurb. Given the repressive regime they lived under, they lived very much on the periphery of the social turmoil that inspired the songs of the era, represented here by sixteen Paul Simon songs plus a few others, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel.

The songs, of course, are very evocative and the business of understanding what it takes, in a Soviet state, to get reception or a decent recording is both amusing and sobering.

To add, in the blurb, “Culturally nourished by Brecht and Russian theatre, this spiritual descendent of Charlie Chaplin is a bold, lucid artist [sic],” is quite a claim (the danger of comparisons again). But in and of itself, this is an intriguing piece of non-western theatre appropriate to an international arts festival for its cultural differences and commonalities with our lives.

Apart from a couple of cheeky girls in PVC coats and long boots, the play is poignantly book-ended with a frumpy woman peddling illicit goods to uptight, brown-suited men. At first it is recordings from the west. At the end it is a more ambiguous drug, captured in a jar and tipped into a bath, in which one man over-doses while others watch in a dispassionate daze …

Glass jars feature throughout, as a means of practising kissing, listening through dividing walls which soon evaporate, and containing ‘milk’ which stands as a metaphor for a marijuana-like drug (they get giggly and stoned but don’t hallucinate, as with LSD).

Single-sex room-sharing soon becomes mixed. People pair off, ‘love’ is unrequited or uninspiring, repairing and regroupings occur …

A ‘Mrs Robinson’ scenario, a la The Graduate, is evoked early on and returned to towards the end. Antonini’s Blow Up, is also referenced, in which a photographer tries to emulate the erotic photo-shoot with super-model Verushka, and two girls attempt to relive the wannabe teenage model scene, wearing the bright blue and red tights but not going so far as to remove their bras.  

A black-and-white art film offers the nudity factor and adds to the sexual liberation theme which, as it is played out here, rarely approaches true sensuality or eroticism. I suppose that is a valid point to make about those experimental times.

Nevertheless all seven women become white brides (presumably no-one just lived together in Latvia). Then they become pregnant and a stylised birth scene is followed by men trying to work out which one is theirs. It’s all amiable, smile-inducing fun.

When characters, relationships and stories don’t develop with any level of complexity or dramatic tension, however, it is a big ask to sustain audience interest for ninety-odd minutes twice. Some on opening night didn’t last past interval, given the many sequences that outstayed their welcome for our ‘first world’ sensibilities. The second half either has more substance or we’ve become more accustomed to its pitch, and given our lowered expectations there is a greater sense of story progression, after a fashion.  

And yes, there is fun with the fashions of the time, the ensemble acting is excellent (but not what I’d call Chaplinesque, in case anyone’s hoping for that), the staging is fluid and clever and – given the overdose and ‘everything upside-down’ image at the end – we do come away with a little something to ponder, amid our remembering or discovering how it was back then for us and realising how different it must have been in Latvia.
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*I’m resisting the temptation to also compare it with last year’s Death and the Dreamlife of Elephants, as an ensemble piece – except to say to all those happy to spend up large on the International Festival every two years, I sincerely hope you also avail yourselves of home-grown fare in your local in between times. For quality and artistic value it more than stands up to comparison.
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Tom Stoppard has an ageing, diehard English Marxist in his playRock ‘n’ Rollsay that “to this day there are men in public life who can’t look me in the eye because I knew them when they dressed like gigantic five-year-olds.”

In the magnificently costumedSound of Silence, which is crammed with period detail, the New Riga Theatre Company from Latvia also takes us back to the 1960s when, for a brief period child-like behaviour, peculiar clothing, and political naivety seemed suitable and subtle ways to undermine and forget the rigid conformity and repressive power of the Soviet Union.

InRock ‘n’ Roll, Stoppard suggests that the pagan spirit of rock’n’roll played a part in the downfall of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia; inSound of Silencethe songs of Simon and Garfunkel are symbolic of the emerging liberalism in the Soviet-occupied Baltic states.

But where the two plays really differ is that Stoppard’s is full of words; inSound of Silence, there are none for three hours and 15 minutes and it doesn’t matter for a second.

Director Alvis Hermanis believes that the violence that pervades modern drama is exhausted and simply boring. It is time, he says, “to make positive theatre; the hardest task of all is to make a performance about harmonious and happy people”.

Peace, love and no more war and all the idealistic dreams of the flower power era are created in a brilliant series of scenes and images that romanticise the period but also display the yearnings of a downtrodden people.

In a rundown apartment block, 14 characters take us through loosely linked scenes of surrealistic humour (five women giving birth at the same time), Marx Brothers hilarity (a room full of people attempting to get good reception to hear a Simon and Garfunkel concert) and wistful humour (a feather being blown about the stage), and in an amazing finale: ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’is played full bore with the entire cast in a number of situations that defy description but make perfect sense on stage.Positive theatre indeed.
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