Rock 'n' Roll reviews

The Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1156412888365&call_pageid=968867495754&col=969483191630
RICHARD OUZOUNIAN
THEATRE CRITIC

LONDON, ENGLAND—Tom Stoppard's latest play is called Rock 'n' Roll and it certainly lives up to its title.

It begins on an August night in 1968, with Syd Barrett, recently turfed from Pink Floyd, perched on a garden wall in Cambridge, England, serenading a teenage girl as Russian tanks roll into Czechoslovakia.

It ends 22 years later, on another August evening, at a Rolling Stones concert in Prague, which signals that the battle for personal liberty in the new Czech Republic is well and truly won.

In between, there are numerous rock selections to bridge the swiftly flying scenes, featuring the Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys and a dissident Czech band called the Plastic People of the Universe.

The way that Stoppard keeps manipulating the music from the background to the foreground is just one of the amazing things about this deeply emotional yet profoundly intellectual play.

Stoppard never has one thing on his mind. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead introduced William Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett, Travesties put World War I into some sort of dramatic Cuisinart, while Arcadia juggled centuries and philosophies with the skill of a circus performer.

Rock 'n' Roll is no exception.

On one level, it's about what happened to the Czech Republic from 1968 through 1990. We see it all through the eyes of a young academic named Jan (Rufus Sewell, dazzlingly complex). He's in Cambridge when the Communists invade and he hurries home to be there, only to find himself disillusioned, then crushed and finally imprisoned for his dissident beliefs and his taste for Western music.

But while his story is playing itself out, we also look at the world back in Cambridge, where a once passionate Communist professor named Max (Brian Cox, taking no prisoners) copes with the loss of his ideals to politics and his wife to cancer at the same time.

That wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack, blazing brilliantly) keeps searching for intellectual rigour with the students she teaches Sappho to, even as her body is melting away.

"There just isn't time!" she explodes at one point and you realize that she's talking about herself, the Czech Republic, the Communist party, Syd Barrett and all of us at the same time.

The play's second act starts in 1989, after the so-called "Velvet Revolution," which ended two decades of Communist tyranny. Stoppard now has Cusack play her teenage daughter Esme from Act I (the one Syd Barrett was serenading), while the earlier young woman (Alice Eve, totally entrancing) now portrays Alice, her daughter.

It sounds complex and if you're not on your toes, it could turn into a blur. But Stoppard has a strong hand on the dramatic helm and director Trevor Nunn moves things along with a calm certainty that insures you always know where to look.

In many ways, the play is difficult to explain and that — ironically enough — is its strength. Stoppard knows that theatre is made up of moments as well as words and thoughts, so he provides plenty of them.

Max holding Eleanor tight in the depths of her despair, Esme remembering the way Syd Barrett once sang to her, Jan poring through the debris of his record collection that the Communists had destroyed — these all bring a lump to the throat.

In some of Stoppard's other supremely dazzling exercises, the intellectual distance between what he was discussing and us could occasionally cause a sort of dramatic chilliness.

Nothing of that sort happens in Rock 'n' Roll. The people and their problems are close enough to our experience for no such disconnect to occur.

And the ever-pulsing rhythm of the music underneath completes the equation. This is a play that gets inside your head and then keeps expanding until it finally explodes. When it does, you're likely to find yourself laughing and crying at the same time.

It's a complete dramatic experience and one that shouldn't be missed.

When people look back on this period in history, Rock 'n' Roll may be the best way of answering the question: What was it like to be alive during the final decades of the 20th century?

Czechs, drugs and rock 'n' roll
Tom Stoppard re-creates a bit of Prague in London

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 26, 2006
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2006/Art/0727/tempo2.php

Rocking around the clock: curmudgeonly Brian Cox and flower child Sinead Cusack.

Syd Barrett is dead, and with him goes a substantial slab of rock history. The reclusive former member of Pink Floyd was the Salinger of music, a flaming creature who burned brightly at the center of '60s rock, who burnt out and lived out his years in the basement of his mother's house in Cambridge. But from Bowie to Blur, Barrett has remained the criterion, the benchmark by which much is measured. In his Guardian obituary, Nick Kent wrote that Barrett "will go down in history as one of the most uniquely inspired creative talents to have sprung up from the pop revolution." But Barrett's inspiration extends further than music.

The timing of Barrett's death seems even more melancholy, as his spirit imbues Tom Stoppard's new play, Rock-n-Roll (now playing in London's West End), which charts the fall and rise of Czechoslovakia between Dubcek's Prague Spring and Havel's Velvet Revolution through the rock music of the age. The character of Barrett even makes a brief appearance at the top of the play as a Pan-like flutist — a Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

As this is Stoppard, Rock-n-Roll is a vast landscape of themes. Rock and recent Czech history serve as ballast for bracing discussions on Western culture and popular culture (the two terms seem interchangeable now), Marxism and philosophy (particularly the mind/body problem). It's a bold piece that at heart is concerned with the ability to retain one's integrity in the face of societal pressures.

Rock-n-Roll ranges from Cambridge to Prague between the years 1968 (that annus terribilis for Czechs) and 1990. Jan (Rufus Sewell), a young Czech student studying at Cambridge, is readying to leave England for the tank-filled streets of Prague, feeling it necessary to share his city's plight. He comes to say goodbye to his professor and mentor, Max (Brian Cox), a staunch Marxist who disapproves of Jan's motives for returning. "Sovereignty was never the point," Max says heatedly. "At the first flutter of a Czech flag, you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk."

Rock-n-Roll

Directed by Trevor Nunn
With Rufus Sewell, Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack and Nicole Ansari
at The Duke of York Theatre, St. Martin's Lane, London
July 22– Sept. 30

The only thing Jan brings back to Czechoslovakia with him is an impressive collection of rock records that the re-emboldened communist authorities immediately impound. What follows is Jan's awakening to the deadening grip the Soviets have upon his city and country. He's at first encouraged by the lack of retribution from the commissars: "You would have bet on mass arrests, the government in jail, everything banned, reformers thrown out of their jobs, out of the universities, the whole Soviet thing, with accordion bands playing Beatles songs." Yet, as the darker '70s begin to unfold, and Jan becomes a supporter of the underground Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, things become clearer for him.

Max makes a visit to Prague to see Jan, but still speaks from his heart as an unrehabilitated communist. "If it wasn't for the 11 million Soviet military dead," Max lectures a dejected Jan, "your little country'd be a German province by now."

It's Stoppard's strength as a writer that Max never becomes a cliché or cartoon. For Max, who is "as old as the October Revolution," his commitment to the cause is forthright and sincere. Yet even this Oxbridge titan will make a grudging peace with the historic inevitability of communism's collapse (belatedly celebrated in the bacchanalian last scene where Max's daughter, Esme, [Sinead Cusack] and Jan finally see the Rolling Stones play at Strahov).

Trevor Nunn's production of Rock-n-Roll is occasionally plodding, but he's assembled a marvelous cast to populate Stoppard's world. Cox is a formidable Max, lacing his cultured, ironic observations of the world with lacerating invective whenever his political philosophy is questioned. Sewell is superb as Jan, a well-crafted surrogate for Stoppard himself, had the Czech-born playwright found himself back in Prague during that grim period. Cusack expertly takes on two roles: Max's wife, Eleanor, a cancer-ridden classics scholar, and daughter Esme, a defunct lovechild trying to find a place for herself in the world.

Stoppard's scene changes are fashioned as "smash cuts," where blasts of music from the period accompany back projections listing the provenance and performers behind the songs, spanning Brian Wilson to Axl Rose. And then there are Barrett's songs with Pink Floyd and after he was forced to go solo (especially the haunting "Golden Hair"). Now the piper's dead, and the dawn seems to have brought a brutal and shoddy capitalist day. And rock 'n' roll, that revolutionary art form, is silent on the matter.

Thanks, Rai!

Stoppard is at his best on life, politics and "Rock"
Monday 10 July 2006

By Ray Bennett
LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) - Alive with ideas about life and politics and brimming with questions of the heart and mind, Tom Stoppard's splendid new play, "Rock 'n' Roll," proves that rock music has far greater significance than being the score to a teenage wasteland.

Written for the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre, the play moves to the Duke of York's Theatre on July 22.

Drawing on his Czech background, Stoppard sets the play from 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into what was then Czechoslovakia, through 1990, when the country emerged from Communist rule. At the outset, Jan (Rufus Sewell) is a Czech academic studying at Cambridge, his life entwined with that of his tutor, Max Morrow (Brian Cox), a stormy and entrenched Marxist, and Morrow's frail wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a tutor of Sapphic poetry.

Jan returns to Prague with his precious collection of rock albums and discovers the terror of repression compared with the freedom he revered in England. Not given to dissent, he is gradually drawn into resisting Soviet oppression and joins what became the Velvet Revolution, which led to the end of communism in his homeland.

Stoppard does not suggest the path is easy, nor does he provide much optimism that true freedom is to be had anywhere except in the heart and mind. The debates between Jan and his Prague friends over what constitutes rebellion, and between Jan and Max over the pros and cons of socialism, are the meaty centre of the play.

Eleanor's discovery that she has cancer and her persuasive argument that what's in the heart can be overwhelmed if the body's machine breaks down goes directly to Stoppard's point about the destructive nature of a closed society.

It all sounds very heavy, but while Stoppard does not indulge in the flights of verbal fancy that feature in his earlier plays, he does construct his scenes and dialogue using his extraordinary gift for beautiful phrases and sentences. The conversations and arguments over dinner in Cambridge and in Jan's album-strewn room in Prague are rich and absorbing, with some very funny jokes.

Each scene is punctuated with a rock track from such acts as the Velvet Underground, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. Songs by Floyd's lost founder, Syd Barrett, are the keynote for Stoppard's theme that rock music sounded the death knell for repression but also heralded a freedom filled with its own perils.

A real-life Prague band, the Plastic People of the Universe, becomes Jan's touchstone for true rebellion, and pied piper Barrett offers a poetic escape for the sadness of Eleanor and the hopes of her daughter, Esme (also Cusack).

Director Trevor Nunn and designer Robert Jones give the play energy and motion, aided greatly by some very good acting from Cox and Cusack and especially from Sewell as the cautiously optimistic expatriate.

Cast:
The Piper/Policeman 1: Edward Hogg
Younger Esme/Alice: Alice Eve
Jan: Rufus Sewell
Max: Brian Cox
Eleanor/Older Esme: Sinead Cusack
Gillian/Magda/Deirdre: Miranda Colchester
Interrogator/Nigel: Anthony Calf
Ferdinand: Peter Sullivan
Milan/Policeman 2/Jaroslav: Martin Chamberlain
Lenka: Nicole Ansari
Candida: Louise Bangay

Playwright: Tom Stoppard; Director: Trevor Nunn; Designer: Robert Jones; Costume designer: Emma Ryott; Lighting designer: Howard Harrison; Sound designer: Ian Dickinson.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Rock 'n' Roll
Benedict Nightingale at the Royal Court

IT’S EASY to forget that Tom Stoppard was born Czechoslovakian, partly because he uses the English language with matchless bravura, partly because he has written just one television play, Professional Foul, about his native country. So what gives his new Rock ’n’ Roll special interest is that it’s a thoroughgoing reminder of his origins. Part of the play is set in Cambridge, but the best of it in Prague between the overthrow of Dubcek in 1968 and the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

The protagonist is Jan, a young academic sent to Britain to snoop for Czechoslovakia but too much of a maverick and too little the communist to please the spymasters. Back home he keeps his head down and indulges his passion, which is listening to his rock ’n’ roll records, but his avid support of a group, improbably called The Plastic People of the Universe, lands him in dead-end jobs and in prison as a “parasite”. And it’s a journey that brings a superb performance from Rufus Sewell: now spry, now frantic, now defeated, then quietly, movingly resilient and always the heart of Stoppard’s fascinating play and Trevor Nunn’s finely acted production.

What’s the point? That will keep real-life academics busy for years, but, for me, it’s mainly to be found in rock ’n’ roll itself.

We hear snatches of songs from groups ranging from the Pink Floyd to U2, the Doors to the Stones and Mick Jagger, who last night sat beaming in the central stalls.

We think that Czechoslovakia changed because of the efforts of Vaclav Havel and the likes of Jan’s earnest friend, Peter Sullivan’s Ferdy, and so it did. But let’s not forget rock ’n’ roll, a demotic, apolitical form that infuriated the cops, inspirited the young and showed the chasm between leaders and led.

Elsewhere, too, Stoppard seems to be decrying reason and exalting the passions. Hence his seemingly irrelevant invocations both of the great god Pan and of the first poet to celebrate erotic desire, Sappho.

And hence the play’s sub-plot or co-plot, which involves Brian Cox as a Cambridge communist who clings to marxism like a barnacle to a rusting ship and Sinead Cusack as his cancer-ridden wife, who finds his materalistic, mechanistic views a cruel insult to herself, human mystery and the world’s complexity.

Towards the end, the play itself seems over-complex and over-busy (please tell me why must we bother with the emotional intricacies of Cox’s granddaughter and the rest of his family?). But never mind. Cusack’s fervent plea still rings round my head: “I am not your amazing biological machine. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.” It could be Sir Tom himself speaking. For him, it’s the spirit of a person, of a person that truly counts — and in Rock ‘n’ Roll, the soul of a nation that matters too.

Box-office: 020-7565-5000

The Independent
First Night: Rock 'n' Roll, Royal Court, London
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/reviews/article1026231.ece

Rock music and romanticism clash culturally with panache
By Paul Taylor
Published: 15 June 2006

At what cultural event could you have seen, among the punters, Vaclav Havel and Mick Jagger, Timothy Garton Ash and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd?

Answer: at the press night of Rock'n'Roll, Tom Stoppard's complex and moving new play about the link between rock music, East European dissidence and the fall of Communism.

Initially weird-seeming juxtapositions in the audience (including the endearingly absurd sight of Havel seated, thanks to a quirk of the ticketing, next to "Acid" Raine Spencer) are, of course, given the author, matched by strange but ultimately rewarding collocations in the piece which draws together such topics as Sappho and Syd Barrett, brain science and spiteful junk journalism.

Stoppard is famously distrustful of faith in Utopias (his last work was a nine-hour trilogy on the subject). The new play is about the danger of closed systems and of thinking that you have broken free and rescued what is human when all that you have done is replace one bad system with another.

Accordingly, the (offstage) heroes of the play - which shuttles between Prague and Cambridge during the period from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the Velvet Revolution - are the real-life psychedelic Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe.

In the scenes set in Prague, we're privy to disputes between two friends who represent conflicting views about dissent in the underground opposition to the hardline Husak regime that replaced Dubcek and his "socialism with a human face".

Ferda (Peter Sullivan) is inclined to dismiss the Plastics as long-haired layabouts who aren't engaged in what matters. That's not the opinion of Jan, the character who (played by the electrically brilliant Rufus Sewell) is like the author's speculative alter-ego, the man Stoppard might have been, had his family returned after the Second World War to Czechoslovakia and ended up living under Communism.

Jan realises that the Plastics rattle the authorities more effectively than the intellectuals by their superb indifference. Policemen love and depend on dissidents for their meaning just as an Inquisition needs them. The Plastic People threw away the board on which this kind of game is played and, to the government's astonishment, their trial in 1976 sparked the protest that led to Charter 77.

Rock music matters deeply to the play and to Trevor Nunn's occasionally over-emphatic production which, between scenes, is punctuated by ironically placed excerpts of the Plastics, Pink Floyd, the Stones et al. In Cambridge and on visits to Prague, Jan's former tutor, Max Morrow, a fiery unrepentant Marxist played by a miscast Brian Cox, bites the head off anyone who casts doubt on the spirit of the October Revolution of 1917.

Sinead Cusack is powerful as Max's cancer-stricken wife who, in her ravaged state, disputes his materialist philosophy of consciousness. And in the second half, she's terribly touching as Esme, his flower-power-child drop-out who, now grown up and the mother of a brilliant daughter of her own, is struggling to find a role.

Some of the intellectual debates have a rather rigged ring and Max feels throughout like a convenient amalgam of different types of academic. I preferred the parts where Stoppard the Romantic asserts himself in ways that are less easy to paraphrase.

It remains an impressive play, likely to expand in the mind.

At what cultural event could you have seen, among the punters, Vaclav Havel and Mick Jagger, Timothy Garton Ash and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd?

Answer: at the press night of Rock'n'Roll, Tom Stoppard's complex and moving new play about the link between rock music, East European dissidence and the fall of Communism.

Initially weird-seeming juxtapositions in the audience (including the endearingly absurd sight of Havel seated, thanks to a quirk of the ticketing, next to "Acid" Raine Spencer) are, of course, given the author, matched by strange but ultimately rewarding collocations in the piece which draws together such topics as Sappho and Syd Barrett, brain science and spiteful junk journalism.

Stoppard is famously distrustful of faith in Utopias (his last work was a nine-hour trilogy on the subject). The new play is about the danger of closed systems and of thinking that you have broken free and rescued what is human when all that you have done is replace one bad system with another.

Accordingly, the (offstage) heroes of the play - which shuttles between Prague and Cambridge during the period from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the Velvet Revolution - are the real-life psychedelic Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe.

In the scenes set in Prague, we're privy to disputes between two friends who represent conflicting views about dissent in the underground opposition to the hardline Husak regime that replaced Dubcek and his "socialism with a human face".

Ferda (Peter Sullivan) is inclined to dismiss the Plastics as long-haired layabouts who aren't engaged in what matters. That's not the opinion of Jan, the character who (played by the electrically brilliant Rufus Sewell) is like the author's speculative alter-ego, the man Stoppard might have been, had his family returned after the Second World War to Czechoslovakia and ended up living under Communism.

Jan realises that the Plastics rattle the authorities more effectively than the intellectuals by their superb indifference. Policemen love and depend on dissidents for their meaning just as an Inquisition needs them. The Plastic People threw away the board on which this kind of game is played and, to the government's astonishment, their trial in 1976 sparked the protest that led to Charter 77.

Rock music matters deeply to the play and to Trevor Nunn's occasionally over-emphatic production which, between scenes, is punctuated by ironically placed excerpts of the Plastics, Pink Floyd, the Stones et al. In Cambridge and on visits to Prague, Jan's former tutor, Max Morrow, a fiery unrepentant Marxist played by a miscast Brian Cox, bites the head off anyone who casts doubt on the spirit of the October Revolution of 1917.

Sinead Cusack is powerful as Max's cancer-stricken wife who, in her ravaged state, disputes his materialist philosophy of consciousness. And in the second half, she's terribly touching as Esme, his flower-power-child drop-out who, now grown up and the mother of a brilliant daughter of her own, is struggling to find a role.

Some of the intellectual debates have a rather rigged ring and Max feels throughout like a convenient amalgam of different types of academic. I preferred the parts where Stoppard the Romantic asserts himself in ways that are less easy to paraphrase.

It remains an impressive play, likely to expand in the mind.

Michael Billington -
Thursday June 15, 2006

Tom Stoppard's astonishing new play is, amongst many other things, a hymn to Pan. It starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair. It ends in Prague in 1990 with film of a Rolling Stones concert led by Mick Jagger, who was in the Royal Court first-night audience.

And, although Stoppard's play deals with Marxism, materialism and Sapphic poetry, it is above all a celebration of the pagan spirit embodied by rock'n'roll.

In plot terms, Stoppard deals with the contrasting fortunes of two worlds: that of Czech freedom-fighters and Cambridge Marxists. The former are represented by Jan: an exiled Czech who returns to Prague in '68, at the time of the Soviet takeover, and who, although primarily a rock-loving non-combatant, finds himself inexorably drawn into dissidence and Charter 77. Meanwhile the Cambridge left is powerfully embodied by Max: an unrepentant Marxist don, as old as the October Revolution, who is still drawn to "this beautiful idea".
What is fascinating about the play is that there are no easy victories. Jan is no heroic martyr, but an observer more drawn to the subversive band, the Plastic People of the Universe, than to protest-movements: it is only the steady erosion of Czech freedom that turns him into a dissident. Stoppard treats his convictions seriously and allows him to score strong debating-points: he is, in fact, the first sympathetic Marxist I can recall in all Stoppard's work.

In presenting two worlds, Stoppard also suggests that, while the Czechs have fought strenuously for their freedoms, we are allowing ours to slip from our grasp. In a crucial second-act dinner-party scene, Stoppard brings together Max, Jan and various representatives of two different cultures. But it is Lenka, an expatriate Czech don who seems to voice his sentiments when she urges Jan not to return, saying "This place has lost its nerve. They put something in the water since you were here. It's a democracy of obedience."

But although Stoppard takes a pessimistic view of an England that seems to have lost any sustaining faith or principles, his play paradoxically finds hope in the liberating spirit of rock'n'roll. Each scene is punctuated by the sounds of legendary groups including the Stones, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. Even though he acknowledges that they have given way to the blander effusions of today, he constantly uses music as a symbol of pagan ecstasy.

All this is clearly articulated in Trevor Nunn's excellent production, in which the scenes are spliced with exultant rock. And the other great virtue of the production is that allows ample scope for each intellectual viewpoint. Brian Cox exudes massive power as the Marxist Max who goes on fighting to the end even after the loss of his wife and his political faith. Rufus Sewell as Jan charts immaculately the character's gradations from passive observer to disgraced dissident and shows him emerging on the other side. And Sinead Cusack, doubling as Max's cancer-stricken wife and grown-up daughter, and Peter Sullivan as a Havel-like Czech protester turn in equally strong performances.

But the remarkable thing about the play is that it touches on so many themes, registers its lament at the erosion of freedom in our society and yet leaves you cheered by its wit, buoyancy and belief in the human spirit.

Until July 15. Box Office: 020 7565 5000

thanks, Uke!

More than rock 'n' roll - and I love it
Charles Spencer -
15/06/2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/06/15/btrock15.xml

Tom Stoppard won't thank me for saying so, but despite his perennially youthful rock star good looks, he turns 70 next year.

R&BRnR.jpg (12752 bytes)

Young man's play: Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell in Rock 'n' Roll

What's astonishing though is that this new piece feels like a young man's play. There is an energy, rawness and passion here one doesn't associate with the elegant and witty Stoppard, passages of unbuttoned emotion that go straight to the heart.

It's especially welcome after his last stage outing, that ponderous trilogy The Coast of Utopia about exiled Russian radicals in the 19th century. That had the scent of perspiration and dogged research in the musty stacks of the London Library.

This new piece smells, well, of sex and drugs and rock and roll. It also feels like an exceptionally personal play, for Stoppard appears to be imagining what his life might have been like had he returned to his native Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, rather than beginning a new life in England.

His hero, Jan, is a Czech academic on study leave in Cambridge when the tanks roll into Prague in 1968. He returns home and when his beloved collection of rock records is smashed up by the secret police and his favourite band is imprisoned, he becomes a dissident involved in the Charter 77 movement.

We follow Jan up to the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution in 1990, but we also keep flashing back to Cambridge, where we meet a hardline English Communist professor who stubbornly clings to his faith however severely it is tested. We also meet three generations of his family, with Stoppard exploring family relationships with rare humour, humanity and passion.

And in between scenes, there are glorious bursts of rock music, from the Stones, Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground and Syd Barrett, the Floyd founder and psychedelic genius who became the great acid casualty of British pop and whose haunting reclusive life in Cambridge becomes a poignant motif of the play.

Rock music thus becomes a symbol of both personal and political freedom and its attendant but exhilarating dangers. Frankly they should gather all the tracks the dramatist has selected and put it out as The Best Tom Stoppard Album in the World Ever.

There are some beautiful speeches from Jan in which he describes his love of England, and its robust tradition of freedom, that surely reflect Stoppard's own feelings for his adopted country. But the play sounds a note of caution. At the end, Jan is warned by a fellow Czech that England is no longer what it was, that "they've put something in the water" and it has become a "democracy of obedience".

One thinks of the present Government, eroding personal liberties with a bland nannyish smile on its face, and reflects that the Czechs fought for a freedom we seem to regard as dispensable. As always in Stoppard there's a feast of ideas - as well as liberty, there are discussions on the poet Sappho and materialist theories of consciousness - but the ideas are constantly accompanied by both strong emotion and excellent jokes.

Trevor Nunn's production could do with a sharper pace and a rougher edge, but there are some tremendous performances, most notably from Rufus Sewell as the endearing, rock-addicted, and remarkably Soppardian Jan, and Sinead Cusack, who plays both a wife and mother dying of cancer, and in the second act, her own exhippie daughter with an emotional vulnerability that adds a new dimension to Stoppard's work.

Brian Cox too, is in strong and surprisingly sympathetic form as the old Communist bruiser. I was tempted to end this review by saying It's only rock'n'roll but I like it. In fact, it's about much more than rock'n'roll, and I love it.
Thanks, Uke!

Evening Standard

Not only Rock 'N' Roll
Reviewed by Nicholas de Jongh
15 June 2006

Innocent playgoers, who expect the theatre to stir their emotions and leave their minds on hold, beware! Rock 'N' Roll only fills the gaps between scenes.

Watching Tom Stoppard's extraordinary, epic drama of politics, persecution and protest in 20th-century Czechoslovakia, with Brian Cox's uncouth Marxist professor at Cambridge, passionately clinging to his Communist convictions while the Perestroika Revolution sidles up to him, is rather like struggling to answer a compulsory degree question in Advanced Stoppardian studies.

There we sit gazing at Robert Jones's dull, minimal revolve set. A garden scene and a book-lined study trundle into view and we are whisked in Trevor Nunn's impassioned production between troubled Prague and calmer Cambridge.

In the blackouts that separate the scenes, rock 'n' roll tracks, from Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones blast potent sounds into nostalgic ears.

How does Stoppard, in spanning the years 1968 to 1990, interrelate Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, Anglo-American rock classics, the Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, vanished Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett, etymological research into the lesbian poet Sappho and even the Materialist theory of consciousness? This last question looms and hovers.

The first, fascinating point to help towards understanding is that the hero, Rufus Sewell's superlatively incarnated Jan, a Czech philosophy student under the red wing of Cox's academic and mad about English rock'n' roll, is Stoppard's alter ego, a fantasy/imaginary version of himself, had he never left Czechoslovakia, aged two, in flight from Hitler.

So Rock 'N' Roll perhaps plays out a guide to how Stoppard would have shaped his political identity in the Seventies after Czechoslovakia had been invaded by Warsaw pact forces.

Opposing points of view are aired, though not with that great dialectical force between Cox's unduly furious, single-dimensional Professor, who refuses to jettison faith in the Revolution and Jan who on returning to Prague refuses to join his Havel-like friend, Ferdinand, among the dissidents.

It is only the arrest of the apolitical Plastic People of the Universe which fires Jan with rebellion. He sees the Plastics as pagans, claiming a fundamental right to be free of ideology's baggage and be true to their creative selves. Jan suffers imprisonment with stoicism and passion that Sewell makes memorably poignant.

This is the clue to the linkage of Stoppard's apparently disparate thematic elements. Beneath the surface of this capacious, insufficiently conflicted drama, there beats the Stoppardian romantic heart.

The materialist theory of brain function, according to Max's wife, Sinead Cusack's devastating, cancer-ridden Greek classicist, as she rips open her dress to show a ruined body, means nothing to her. She believes in souls, in minds not brains, in rare individuality of which Sappho's undeciphered texts are such difficult, classic examples.

Similarly Stoppard's relish for rock'n' roll, for the exiled Barrett seen as some crucial, romantic equivalent of the Great God Pan emphasises Stoppard's belief in the influence of mystic outsiders.

Rock 'N' Roll, in its humorous, domestic settling of scores, revelation of middle-aged love and concealed altruism, in Max and his daughter, drive the play on a more mundane tack. This is not quite first-rate Stoppard but still ought to generate a big and serious stir.
Thanks, Uke

Rock 'n' Roll
by Michael Coveney
15th June 2006
http://www.whatsonstage.com/dl/page.php?page=greenroom&story=E8821150356394

WOS Rating: 5 stars

No one writes argument, information and good jokes all at once and as well as does Tom Stoppard, and his enthralling, sensational new play, Rock 'n' Roll at the Royal Court is the most moving and autobiographical of his career.

Travelling between Cambridge in 1968 and Prague in 1990, the subject is what happened, bounded by those dates, in Stoppard’s native country of Czechoslovakia: the Soviet invasion, the dissident resistance of Charter 77 and the Plastic People of the Universe rock group, and finally the Velvet Revolution.

The leading figure in this saga, Vaclav Havel, to whom the play is dedicated, sat among the first night audience, a few seats from the author and next to, bizarrely, Raine Spencer, the step-mother of the late Princess Diana.

Kenneth Tynan, in a famous essay, once said that Havel was Stoppard’s mirror image. The play’s leading character, Jan, a Czech philosopher at Cambridge – the name stirs echoes of the philosopher Jan Patocka and the student martyr Jan Palach – who loves the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground, returns home and is gradually drawn into the political maelstrom.

It’s as though Stoppard is imagining a version of himself in a reverse scenario of his own emigration to England, investing Jan with his own educated diffidence. In Cambridge, he’s at odds with the uncompromising left-wing don Max Morrow, who expresses the dilemma of being a good Marxist in a discredited political system.

The British perspective widens to include flower power – the play starts with the Pan-like figure of Syd Barrett, the lost dark angel of Pink Floyd, serenading Max’s daughter; and feminism – Max’s wife, Eleanor, is tutoring in Sapphic poetry while dying of cancer. One of the masterstrokes is to have the same actress – the translucent Sinead Cusack – play both Eleanor and the grown-up daughter, Esme.

While the “socialism with a human face” of Alexander Dubcek (“a nice guy but, basically, Cliff Richard” says Jan) is replaced by the repressive Husak regime, Mrs Thatcher comes to power in Britain with 37 percent of the popular vote. The increasingly rancid tone of public life is summed up at a dinner party where a former radical journalist (“My boyfriend was a Black Dwarf cartoonist”) is assaulted for writing an intrusive tabloid article about Syd Barrett.

Trevor Nunn has presented this fascinating, intelligent and engaging play in one of his very best productions, brilliantly designed by Robert Jones, covering the scene changes with blasts of the greatest rock music of the era – Dylan, the Stones, the Velvets, Pink Floyd – that express meaning beyond words, the dream of liberation in music that both Jan and indeed Havel believe in.

The casting is impeccable. Rufus Sewell is a husky-voiced, sympathetic figure of increasing involvement, while Brian Cox is simply majestic as the voice of the old left whose integrity is left intact for once. Alice Eve as the daughter and Nicole Ansari as a feminist flame-carrier for a pessimistic diagnosis of British society are both outstanding. Anthony Calf and Peter Sullivan, in a bewildering (but never naff) succession of hairstyles, suggest figures of British condescension and Czech resilience.

Ironically, given the puritan disdain in some quarters for the arrival of Stoppard and Nunn, Cavaliers both, in Sloane Square, Rock 'n' Roll is easily the best political and most grown-up play at the Royal Court in living memory. I can hardly wait to read the text and see it again at the earliest opportunity.
Thanks, Uke!

Bloomberg News

Stoppard's `Rock 'n' Roll' Draws Havel, Jagger
by Matt Wolf
June 16 (Bloomberg) --
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000088&sid=aNhSdoAi2vaQ&refer=culture

It's not every day you find Vaclav Havel, Mick Jagger and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour in the audience at a London opening night.

But Tom Stoppard's new play ``Rock 'n' Roll,'' at the Royal Court for six weeks prior to a commercial transfer to the West End, is dedicated to the onetime Czech president and steeped in the music of those two rock-music greats, so all three were on hand to witness that rare play in which they play a very real part.

Were they disappointed? I can't imagine, given the clamorous reception that greeted Trevor Nunn's production and a leading performance from Rufus Sewell that is dazzling. Whether audiences are will depend on their willingness to sit out a long and occasionally clunky first act on the way to a second half that builds to precisely the ecstatic release promised by the title.

This play's name might seem unusually accessible for a writer whose astonishing output has mined for inspiration the poetry of Englishman A. E. Housman (in ``The Invention of Love'') and the Romanian-born Dadaist Tristan Tzara (in the Tony Award-winning ``Travesties'').

Just as the Monkees' song ``I'm a Believer'' provided a heartbeat of sorts to another Stoppard Tony-winner, ``The Real Thing,'' so do 22 years of rock-and-roll here animate a play about people and ideologies and the vexed relationship between them. The best rock music (the play's aural mix includes Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Velvet Underground) can reach those places never dreamed of by political dogma.

References to Syd

At first, you fear that Stoppard is preparing an illustrated lecture on the period beginning in 1968 in the days before Syd Barrett, a frequently referenced figure in the play, departed Pink Floyd, the group he helped to found. Each scene is separated, rather laboriously, by music accompanied by projections that give you the provenance of that song, where it was recorded, the names of the musicians and so on.

What of the sheer visceral charge generated by the music? ``Rock 'n' Roll'' gives that off in time, though not until the scenes develop into longer, sustained encounters rather than a series of piecemeal face-offs.

Not that the tete-a-tetes are uninteresting, especially with the galvanic Sewell in this play's demanding driver's seat. Playing Jan, a visiting lecturer to Cambridge University who returns to his native Czechoslovakia only to land in prison, Sewell gives ``Rock 'n' Roll'' its immediate and restless pulse.

Plastic People

A follower of the very band, the psychedelic Plastic People of the Universe, launched in the same year (1968 ) in which this play begins, Jan suffers for his convictions just as those subversive musicians did for theirs. ``Rock 'n' Roll,'' in turn, takes us from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia through to the Velvet Revolution, contrasting the agitation abroad with a U.K. political scene in growing thrall to Margaret Thatcher and, the play suggests, gathering complacency, as well.

As Jan shuttles between Prague and Cambridge -- an Englishman, one feels, in everything but accent -- the character seems to morph into a thinly veiled variant on Stoppard himself. Or the Stoppard that the Czech-born playwright might have been had he ever returned to live in the home country his family fled at the outset of World War II. (One crucial difference: Stoppard does not speak Czech whereas Jan does.)

Shifting between countries in much the way that his abiding masterwork, ``Arcadia,'' did between centuries, ``Rock 'n' Roll'' is on rougher ground, at least to start with, in the scenes involving Max (a blustery Brian Cox), Jan's Cambridge mentor and an avowed Marxist who speaks proudly of being the same age as the October Revolution from 1917.

Extreme Wig

Sighing ``what is to be done?,'' as Lenin did before him, Max looks on as he loses a wife to cancer and, eventually, a daughter to Jan: both female roles are taken by a resplendent Sinead Cusack, though it takes a pretty extreme wig in the second act to make Cusack convincing as the grown-up daughter of the Sappho scholar she plays earlier on.

But if the head is sometimes seen to be battling the heart -- most overtly so in the clash between the tenacious Communist, Max, and his ailing, grieving wife -- the play goes on to collapse such distinctions, in keeping with its music.

Sure, we might wish for a more graceful design than Robert Jones's skeletal turntable set and (further on the wig front) some of the supporting cast are little more than a collection of hairpieces. Yet perhaps it's because Stoppard's last play, ``The Coast of Utopia,'' spent nine hours anatomizing various 19th-century social and intellectual movements that ``Rock 'n' Roll'' finally lands on such exuberant shores.

(Matt Wolf is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Music of politics in a state that no longer exists
June 15, 2006
Alastair Macaulay
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/078ef9b8-fcb1-11da-9599-0000779e2340.html

The young Tom Stoppard told the editor of London’s Evening Standard that he was interested in politics, but then admitted he didn’t know who the home secretary was – after which he remarked: “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed.” Well, he’s come a long way since then, writes Alastair Macaulay.

His new play is his most political, and it may well be one of his most personal. It’s about the politics of his native land, Czechoslovakia, in the era 1968-1990 (to an extent that suggests both interest and obsession), and it features many of that era’s rock-related songs, to which he is well known to be devoted: the Stones, Pink Floyd, plus the Czech group Plastic People of the Universe.

Stoppard also once said that all his plays are about “the man who was two men”. In Rock’n’Roll, that man is Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Cambridge-educated Czech lecturer and writer who, through the last decades of the Communist era in Prague, retains his affection for things British, along with his passion for rock. And, as with several previous Stoppard plays, this one alternates between two different zones: not between eras (as in Arcadia and The Invention of Love) but between places (as in The Coasts of Utopia). While Jan is coping with interrogation, surveillance and prison in his country, his old Marxist mentor Max (Brian Cox) in Cambridge deals with scholarship, his wife’s cancer affliction, his own old age and the change of Britain from the Wilson 1960s into full-blown Thatcherism. Who can miss the irony here? Cambridge is beset with tough difficulties, yet it is an idyll beside the realities of life in Czechoslovakia.

But, more than ever before, Stoppard here is writing the play that is two plays – with problems in both. The Cambridge scenes, especially those that focus less on Max than on his wife Eleanor and daughter Esme, are in frequent danger of seeming gratuitous; yet it is in the scenes for Eleanor, even when she is just conducting a tutorial on translating Sappho, that we can feel, most movingly, that we’re in the kind of drama in which Stoppard is gripping and unique. Here is the drama of epistemology: how do our different ways of knowing things coexist within us? No other playwright can make issues of erotic knowledge rub shoulders effortlessly with issues of palaeo-graphy. In Eleanor (beautifully played by Sinead Cusack), these things come together powerfully, so we feel more fully Stoppard’s central irony. For all that Eleanor is riddled with cancer and full of tension, this life in which she can argue about the meaning of one word in Sappho is – after the Prague episode we’ve just watched – blest.

By contrast, the Czech scenes are the play’s narrative core: its time-frame moves from the end of Dubcek’s regime to the start of Havel’s. (The play’s separate threads come together at the start, when Jan leaves Cambridge, and at the end when he revisits it.) Exhilaratingly, Stoppard has Jan and his Prague friend Ferdinand talk politics and rock’n’roll in the same breath (Jan: “Dubcek’s a nice guy, but basically Cliff Richard”). The play’s strongest visual image is the moment when Jan finds his large collection of vinyl rock has been trashed by the police. Sewell, suddenly here finding the greatest peak of his career, marvellously shows how Jan travels far the largest arc of any character here: from a dynamo with dark grapevine curls to a gently emotional grey-haired observer.

We can appreciate the situation (very Stoppard) whereby Jan and Ferdinand, though central on stage, are supporting characters to the larger offstage situation. But although Stoppard often makes that remarkably interesting, he doesn’t make it theatrically absorbing. And Jan, for all his initial energy and charm, has less internal drama than the conflicted Eleanor or the old bruiser Max. Instead, Stoppard keeps plunging us more quickly than we can follow into aspects of Czech politics and intense talkiness – and some of the Cambridge male political talkiness is, as drama, no better.

Beyond these structural issues, Stoppard and his director, Trevor Nunn, give us the headache of numerous, prolonged scene changes marked by individual rock’n’roll tracks. Each song is labelled for us on the drop curtain in loving, swottish detail, but, although we know that these songs all matter to Jan and other characters, we still end up listening to more Pink Floyd than the play knows how to use. The play has many structural felicities (Cusack plays Eleanor in act one, Esme in act two), but no fewer loose ends (such as Esme’s ex-husband’s second wife).

Stoppard has given us imperfect craftsmanship before, though, while nonetheless giving us first-rate drama. Rock’n’Roll, for all the rich spectrum it covers, is the first Stoppard premiere I’ve attended that hasn’t sent me out of the theatre with my head filled with the drama of thought.
Thanks, Uke!

Miranda Colchester & Rufus Sewell in Rock 'n' Roll

Those awaiting a reteaming of one of the most galvanic stage pairings of the 1990s can start exulting right now: Rufus Sewell, the fine-boned actor who burst to the forefront of the British theatre as the original Septimus in Arcadia in 1993, has reteamed with the playwright Tom Stoppard to equally electrifying effect. As Jan, a somewhat reluctant Czech dissident whose life is intricately bound up with the popular music of the period, Sewell gives galloping force to Stoppard's latest play, Rock 'n' Roll, in a performance likely to have the same effect on audiences that the Rolling Stones, amongst many others, have on the various characters in Stoppard's long, sometimes clunky but, in the end, emotionally liberating play. One's last image of Sewell is of a man in full, unself-conscious thrall both to a woman (Sinead Cusack's onetime flower-child, Esme) and to a sound that between them transcend politics—just as Rock 'n' Roll, for all its debates on such topics as Marxist dogma, does as well.

Sewell plays an academic caught between two cultures, who is first glimpsed in Cambridge bidding farewell to his mentor of sorts, Max Morrow (Brian Cox), an unrepentant Communist who prides himself on being precisely the same age as the October Revolution of 1917. As the play opens, it's 1968, and Jan is returning to his native Prague, taking nothing with him but—a telling detail—his records. On his way home, in his words, "to save Socialism," Jan is easily read as an imagined version of Stoppard himself—or, more accurately, the Stoppard that might have been if his family hadn't fled Czechoslovakia at the outset of World War II, the dramatist now even more firmly entrenched an Englishman than the Anglomaniacal Jan in this play. (One crucial difference is that Stoppard, interestingly, doesn't speak Czech, whereas Jan, of course, does.) An early exchange in the play about Jan's somewhat cautious Jewishness ("so it seemed," he notes, deadpan, in response to a question as to whether he was Jewish) tallies intriguingly with Stoppard's own remarks on the topic, the playwright raising well into his career issues of religious identification much as Mike Leigh also did last year in his latest play, Two Thousand Years.

Politics, though, remain this play's abiding concern, which is to say systems that encompass people who will not always be claimed by them. And yet, the call to arms, whatever the specific "ism" involved, can't easily compete with the siren song of Pan, the piper heard at the start of the play. A pagan force, his presence inhabits the subversive music of the psychedelic Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose actual fate becomes enmeshed with that of the fictional Jan, who ends up in prison courtesy the same country of which the armchair Communist, Max, can claim to be "looking east to the source" for some better way. In a classic case of Stoppardian contradiction, Jan admires the British for the very moderation and relativism that exasperates Max, for whom his country's working class long ago gave up on being agents of change when they could instead be willing slaves to the tabloid press.

Arcadia moved effortlessly between centuries in a National Theatre debut staging from Trevor Nunn that was famously light on its feet. (The subsequent Lincoln Center transfer, though good enough, wasn't quite so fleet.) Here, swapping not between centuries but locations, from Cambridge to Prague and back again across 22 years, Nunn's staging gives off a disconcerting sense early on of the lecture hall—albeit on topics not usually studied at Cambridge, which is to say the provenance of the various songs from Dylan, the Stones, Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground that punctuate the scene changes: more information than you ever wanted to know gets projected before us until the lights go up on another view of Robert Jones' not terribly interesting skeletal turntable of a set.

In the first act, too, we seem to be listening to a lot of position papers, however fervently Cox, returning to a regular home at the Royal Court, puts them forth. Against his intellectual entrenchment, Cusack cuts to the affective quick playing a wife, Eleanor, so ravaged by cancer that it's amazing her character can still conduct tutorials, even from a garden table. But there she sits, decoding alongside her students the writings of Sappho and deriding the pronouncements on consciousness profferred by her husband. Cusack, a great actress absolutely tailor-made for Stoppard, returns in act two as her first-act character's now grown-up daughter, Esme, a casting gambit that requires a somewhat dubious wig to carry off, though it's worth it for the shining empathy brought by Cusack to the closing scenes.

On the wig front, Sewell's changing hair length constitutes an ancillary play all its own, and the actor is never less than wonderful, whether adopting the Byronic stature recalled from Arcadia or tapping into a quiet sweetness I've never clocked in him before. Cunningly, the actor adopts a gentle, entirely convincing Czech accent in conversation with the English characters in the play, reverting to his own English accent when talking to those characters who are themselves Czech (one of whom, Peter Sullivan's Ferdinand, turns the topic of hair into a visual punchline). It's rending in the context of this play to hear of Jan's records having been smashed by the authorities in 1976—doubly so on a night when Mick Jagger and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour (not to mention Vaclav Havel) were in the Court audience. But as the second act continues, Rock 'n' Roll raises its own accelerating beat all the way to a giddy finale in which the British theatre's most celebrated wordsmith, and not for the first time, lands an audience in the joyous realm beyond language.

Rock 'n' Roll
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

The Independent

Rock 'n' Roll, Royal Court Downstairs, London
By Kate Bassett
Published: 18 June 2006

Your rolling stone gathers no proverbial moss and Tom Stoppard isn't dragging his feet in Rock 'n' Roll. This keenly awaited premiere, directed by Trevor Nunn, offers a whirlwind tour of Czech history from the Prague Spring and Soviet clampdown of 1968 through to 1990 and the USSR's liberating dissolution. The passing years are also punctuated with vintage hits by The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd et al, and the action zigzags between Prague and Cambridge as we follow the life of Rufus Sewell's Czech-born Jan and the Morrow family who befriend him in the groves of English academe.

Jan begins as an expat PhD student and avid rock fan, treated as a protégé by Brian Cox's Professor Max Morrow, a bullish diehard Communist Party member. But Jan is eager to support Dubcek's reforms and returns to his native land as a journalist. Though naively optimistic and actually more interested in his cherished record collection than political dissidents, Jan nevertheless finds himself frighteningly entangled with the authorities. He is required to act as an informer but starts openly protesting - by signing Charter 77 - when his local heroes, the band The Plastic People of the Universe, are persecuted. Jan is himself kept under surveillance and reduced to menial jobs. Finally, in 1990, he visits the Morrows once more, discussing now-accessible Secret Service files with Max and happily hooking up with his daughter, Sinead Cusack's Esme Morrow, who was a hippy teenager (played by Alice Eve) back in '68. By the by, amongst other subplots, Esme's mother, Eleanor (Cusack in an earlier incarnation), has battled with cancer and, we gather, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett - who once serenaded Esme like Pan on her garden wall - has become a decrepit figure hounded by Britain's free but shabby press.

Stoppard throws up stacks of ideas here: questions about our intense (or limited) commitment in love, politics and the arts, about ideals and practical realities (likened by Max to a double helix), about decay and renewal and where our identity resides (in mind or body) etc.

Simultaneously, Rock 'n' Roll is a striking exercise in dramatic compaction as well as coda to The Coast Of Utopia, Stoppard's trilogy about pre-Revolutionary Russian radicals. Esme and others - during tutorials on Greek and Latin poetry - talk about lacunae and elisions, and this play is itself structured around gaps. Major political and personal events occur offstage, just slipped in via fleeting conversational comments whether it's Dubcek being ousted, perestroika, Jan's year in prison or Eleanor's death.

The trouble is everything whizzes by so hurriedly that this piece barely get to grips with its manifold ideas. The intellectual discussions can feel both obtrusive and almost garbled, because they are somwhat underdeveloped. Meanwhile, though Robert Jones's revolving set has potentially winning fluidity, the blackouts between each brief scene seem to take up half the evening, offering blasts of the aforementioned rock bands with only loosely relevant lyrics.

That said, the ambitious scope of Rock 'n' Roll is always interesting and Jan's background is intriguingly close to the playwright's, almost as if the latter is imagining how his life might have taken another course. He and Nunn also engagingly combine politics with intimacy, wit and a wonderful closing surge of romance and fresh hope. Though Cox occasionally lapses into his trademark bellowing, he exudes authentic earthiness. Cusack has a very funny and fierce temper as Eleanor and sweet nervousness as Esme, and Sewell's Jan is magnetic, immature but then long-suffering, gentle and ardent.
k.bassett@ independent.co.uk

International Herald Tribune

History lessons on stage
By Matt Wolf

Published: June 20, 2006

LONDON For a dramatist who has on occasion dealt with history, it seems appropriate that Tom Stoppard should make a bit of history, too. His new play "Rock 'n' Roll," at the Royal Court for another month before starting a commercial run in late July on the West End, is, unusually for the Czech-born Stoppard, concerned with the country of his birth. That Trevor Nunn's acceleratingly enjoyable production takes a keen interest in many other things is to be expected, as well: Sapphic poetry, Marxist dogma, and the ravages of cancer, to name but a few. Oh yes, and rock and roll.

But what most excites about a play guaranteed to deepen in texture as its run continues is the human face Stoppard puts on a defining 22 years in Anglo-European politics. Starting in 1968 - a date crucial to the ructions, some happy and others definitely not, that were felt across Europe - and hurtling forward to 1990, "Rock 'n' Roll" encompasses the collapse of Communism, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher, and the Velvet Revolution. Such potential abstractions are always tethered to the music of the age, whether Pink Floyd (with or without Syd Barrett, a co-founder), Bob Dylan, or, in the head- rushingly giddy finish, the Rolling Stones. (No wonder Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel were both visible in the audience on opening night.)

It's hard to write history on stage, especially if you don't have the Shakespearean breadth that makes, say, "Henry V" viable on both an intimate and an epic scale. David Hare has an extended success in New York at the moment with his Off Broadway play "Stuff Happens," in which Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice all figure as characters. "Rock 'n' Roll," by contrast, shows us ordinary mortals caught up in some extraordinary times, starting with the Czech university lecturer Jan (Rufus Sewell), who returns home to Prague from his beloved Cambridge only to end up for a period in prison, his lot not easily separated from that of his country's popular psychedelic band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose fate makes for its own mini-history lesson in dissident rock.

Like Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia," also originally directed by Nunn and starring Sewell, "Rock 'n' Roll" alternates between locales throughout, even if in this play the chronology only moves forward. (The earlier script shifted back and forth in time). And Sewell, astonishingly, proves every bit the match here of his career-making performance from before, his Jan a terrifically endearing Czech/Jewish everyman who takes a play that could have appealed solely to the head and aims it, unforgettably, at the heart.

Stoppard's achievement is intensified when set in the context of other London openings of late. "Enemies" finishes its Almeida Theatre run this weekend, which gives audiences a few more days to seize a rare glimpse of Maxim Gorky's 1906 play about a Russia on the cusp, poised for a revolution that wouldn't in fact arrive for another eleven years. But the seeds are sown for upheaval in a society far less tranquil than the verdant enclosure of Simon Higlett's set might suggest. The murder of a factory manager sends on a collision course the various strata of a country headed toward a very real self-reckoning, the play's title itself employed at the climax to point to a people at persistent odds with one another.

Now if only those people were more than so many types - or possessed an individual weight that went beyond the rhetoric they freely let fly. "How can we change?" someone questions; another adding, "How can we live differently?" Most of all, how can a Russia that has been in thrall to the czar accommodate the burgeoning restlessness of the working classes, not to mention the sense, as the actress-character Tatyana puts it, "of everything falling apart." As played with sultry command by Amanda Drew, Tatyana is one of the few characters to emerge in bold relief on Gorky's vast canvas, as proffered here in a new version by Hare. The others, while certainly as good as their given time center- stage allows, get subsumed within Michael Attenborough's ambitious production into an enveloping impression of a play not so much on the pulse of history as, in the end, overtaken by it.

Things could, however, be worse: For proof, consider "The Overwhelming," the play by the American writer J.T. Rogers in repertory at the National Theatre's Cottesloe auditorium through Aug. 8. The first play - in my experience, anyway - to tackle the subject of the Rwandan genocide from 1994, Max Stafford-Clark's production must boldly go where such recently acclaimed films as "Shooting Dogs" and "Hotel Rwanda" have led. (The play is a co-production with Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint company, which will tour the show throughout Britain in the autumn.)

Can "The Overwhelming" compete with its celluloid forbears? Not on your life, which is another way of saying that the evening on some deeply fundamental level trivializes the life-and-death situation it wants to stare down. Its focus is a naïve American abroad, an academic named Jack Exley (Matthew Marsh), who appears so dim on fundamentals that one wonders how he even boarded the necessary flight(s). Arrived in Africa with his (black) second wife and a teenage son from his first marriage, Jack gets caught up in a narrative resembling a cheesier riff on the likes of John Le Carré: What has happened to the AIDS doctor Jack traveled all this way to see? The answer emerges by way of a mysterious phone call, a thunderstorm, and other age-old templates of the thriller.

And when "The Overwhelming" does aim higher, it lands with a thud. "This isn't Sweden," we hear, self-evidently, as the extent of the Hutu-Tutsi hostilities makes itself felt. In this case, it's not that the topic is too, well, overwhelming a slab of recent history for the theater to manage but that Rogers, for all his avowed empathy for the material, seems way too removed from it. "You have to be here to start making sense of the place," Jack is told not long after arrival. This play gives ample proof of that.

LONDON For a dramatist who has on occasion dealt with history, it seems appropriate that Tom Stoppard should make a bit of history, too. His new play "Rock 'n' Roll," at the Royal Court for another month before starting a commercial run in late July on the West End, is, unusually for the Czech-born Stoppard, concerned with the country of his birth. That Trevor Nunn's acceleratingly enjoyable production takes a keen interest in many other things is to be expected, as well: Sapphic poetry, Marxist dogma, and the ravages of cancer, to name but a few. Oh yes, and rock and roll.

But what most excites about a play guaranteed to deepen in texture as its run continues is the human face Stoppard puts on a defining 22 years in Anglo-European politics. Starting in 1968 - a date crucial to the ructions, some happy and others definitely not, that were felt across Europe - and hurtling forward to 1990, "Rock 'n' Roll" encompasses the collapse of Communism, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher, and the Velvet Revolution. Such potential abstractions are always tethered to the music of the age, whether Pink Floyd (with or without Syd Barrett, a co-founder), Bob Dylan, or, in the head- rushingly giddy finish, the Rolling Stones. (No wonder Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel were both visible in the audience on opening night.)

Variety
June 19, 2006 - June 25, 2006

Stoppard offers crash course in Czech history
BY: DAVID BENEDICT

ROCK 'N' ROLL

(ROYAL COURT THEATER: 386 SEATS; £25 ($46) TOP)
LONDON A Royal Court Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Trevor Nunn. Sets, Robert Jones; costumes, Emma Ryott; lighting, Howard Harrison; sound; Ian Dickinson; production stage manager, Paul Handley. Opened, reviewed June 14, 2006. Running time: 3 HOURS.

Jan ..... Rufus Sewell
Max ..... Brian Cox
Eleanor, Esme ..... Sinead Cusack
Interrogator, Nigel ..... Anthony Calf
Ferdinand ..... Peter Sullivan
Young Esme, Alice ..... Alice Eve
Gillian, Magda,
Deirdre ..... Miranda Colchester
Piper, Policeman 1,
Stephen ..... Edward Hogg
Milan, Policeman 2,
Jaroslav ..... Martin Chamberlain
Lenka ..... Nicole Ansari
Candida ..... Louise Bangay

On the face of it, Tom Stoppard is the least autobiographical of writers. A master conjuror of language and situation, he's so dextrous at juggling ideas you almost don't notice him keeping raw emotion at arm's length. Yet his last play, the three-part "The Coast of Utopia," was about exiles, a theme peculiarly close to his heart. The playwright regarded as quintessentially English was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and left there a year later. And powerfully evoked emigre feelings of confused identity --- what you have and what you have lost --- are central to his dangerously diffuse but cumulatively emotional new play "Rock 'n' Roll." Had Stoppard returned from England to Communist Czechoslovakia after Soviet-led troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, the year in which the play opens, he might have been very like his central character. Jan (Rufus Sewell) has been basking with delight in all things English while studying at Cambridge .

Jan is initially surrounded by the fiercely argumentative but appealing family who individually embody the play's many governing ideas. Max Morrow (Brian Cox) is Jan's professor, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist hard-liner utterly unable to countenance anything so lily-livered as a gray area.

Max's unshakeable belief in the importance of the Socialist system over individual lives is contrasted by his wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), an academic specializing in the writings of Sappho. Her work, therefore, is about not just individual passion but the necessity of individual interpretation. She is also fighting the cancer that's overtaking her body, a personal struggle played out against the wider death of idealism and hope. Those two notions are what define her dreamy daughter Esme (Alice Eve), whom we first meet in the opening scene as a sweetly naive 16-year-old with a crush on Jan.

By the end of the play in 1990, Jan and Esme have reunited. The play's focus, however, is on the politics surrounding separate journeys through twin histories of the intervening years.

This is outlined in cross-cut scenes between Prague and Cambridge, in a manner more akin to film that makes enormous demands of designer Robert Jones. Faced with endless short scenes switching locations that need constant updating, he resorts to domestic interiors on a cumbersome revolve with the side walls of the set changing to illustrate each city.
Having returned home, Jan believes in the possibility of accommodation within the system and remains skeptical of his friend Ferdinand (Peter Sullivan), who sees nothing but danger in state control.

Events, however, overtake Jan. He's imprisoned for dissidence, which actually grows out of his obsessive love of rock 'n' roll, most notably Czech band the Plastic People of the Universe, whose 1976 trial for being subversive sparked the protest that led to the Velvet Revolution.
Throughout the long and forbiddingly dense first act, the fury of contrasting English and Czech political struggles are painstakingly detailed, as are the sounds that accompanied them. Rock was everyone's soundtrack, and each scene is fronted by snatches of pertinent music of the period, from Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys singing ironically, "Wouldn't it be nice to live together/In the kind of world where we belong."

In the first half, ambition outstrips achievement. Anyone without a basic grasp of Czech politics is likely to be lost in the interstices of the arguments. It's gratifying to have a dramatist refusing to over-explain, but it's hard to measure the weight of exchanges when information overrides drama, because there is so little subtext with which to engage. The exception is a fight between intransigent Max and dying Eleanor. She furiously argues that his belief in collectivism and the insignificance of individual power puts him "in cahoots with my cancer." The ravening disease may be eating her alive, but her soul remains. That scene resonates in the far less expository --- and more emotionally accessible --- second half, the play's structure bearing out Eleanor and Sappho's distinction between machinery and personal spirit.

With the arguments and circumstances set up, the characters breathe. Furthermore, the play turns out to be about England as much as Czechoslovakia, as Jan returns to discover what ideals England has betrayed and lost in the 32 years since he left.

Released from the need to express ideologies, the actors blossom. Cox cannot quite suggest the intellectual agility of his position, but he's strong on Max's arrogant immensity. After lending watchful grace to gaunt Eleanor in the first half, Cusack transforms into Eleanor's own frustrated grownup daughter Esme in the second. Her body loosens, her speech slows and she makes Esme's wistfulness truly beguiling.

The play's romantic conclusion might be seen as a lurch into sentimentality were it not for Cusack and, most particularly, Sewell. Effective as a student about 15 younger than his actual age, by the end Sewell is astonishingly convincing as a man 20 years older than himself. His increasingly stoic physicality alone charts the play's seeming death of hope. It's like watching a soul seize up in front of you, his voice subtly rising and thinning with the passing years.

Elsewhere, even an actor as good as Anthony Calf cannot save Esme's journalist husband from Stoppard's contemptuous caricature. And some overly deliberate perfs in smaller roles suggest director Trevor Nunn has succumbed to a bout of earnestness.

Reading the play afterwards, all sorts of carefully planted ideas and parallels make themselves plain. In an era when plays of ideas tend to be thin on the ground and wafer-thin, it seems perverse to wish this one were not thick with plots and arguments but Nunn's valiant fidelity to the text has resulted in a laborious first half that risks losing the audience. Thankfully, the second delivers a depth that recall not the discussions of "The Coast of Utopia" but the humanity of "The Real Thing."

variety.com

European history gets a make-over in an uneasy marriage of politics and pop
Rosie Millard - New Statesman
Monday 26th June 2006

To appreciate Tom Stoppard's new play you need a firm grasp of the history of communism and an anorak's knowledge of late 1960s music. Rock'n'Roll manages, just, to pull off an overview of the turbulent politics of Czechoslovakia 1968-1990, as witnessed by the rock journalist Jan (Rufus Sewell).

Events in Prague are played off against a history of 20th-century British Marxist activity centred on Max (Brian Cox), an ageing, irascible communist and Cambridge academic. In addition, Stoppard juggles references to the October and velvet revolutions, by way of Stalin, Dubcek, Gorbachev and, of course, Václav Havel, to whom the play is dedicated.

Stoppard has dealt with postwar Czechoslovakian politics before, in his bouncy 1970s television comedy Professional Foul. Now, however, our leading playwright, in elder statesman mode, has put the politics before the drama - and it seems as if the director, Trevor Nunn, hasn't had the nerve to complain

As Jan, Sewell delivers a knock-out performance, going from long-haired idealist to prison-cropped cynic and back again. He is an actor who once looked as if he was bound for Hollywood. America's loss is our gain. He manages the rapid changes of both accent and hair-length with conviction, and manfully copes with the achingly long political expositions that dog the first half. Stoppard is so busy presenting his native Czechoslovakia as a test case for the failure of communism that, after about 40 minutes of speechifying, you stop wondering where socialism went wrong and start wondering where this play went wrong.

The work's inspiration/muse (the meaning of these words provides a typical Stoppardian diversion) is the real-life story of a long-forgotten Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe. The long hair and anti-establishment stance of the PPU was a big deal in Czech resistance circles, and they paid for it with their freedom. Yet, provided with little more than two-dimensional descriptions, I was left feeling pretty tepid about their fate. More arresting musical references come from the chronological insertion of anthems by the Floyd, Dylan and the Stones, blasted out over a blackened stage and tracking the events of the play.

In Rock'n'Roll, the songs and the bands provide an alternative view of the politics behind the Iron Curtain. To Jan, they represent expression, art, creativity, soul; his giant record collection is a testimony to human liberation. Being a rock fan is also about choice. Having the freedom to choose whether to listen to the Fugs or the Doors is part of what it means to be human. In an Orwellian moment, Jan returns from prison to find his beloved albums smashed to pieces by the Authorities.

The emotional core of the evening is not in the politics, however, or the rock'n'roll, but in a scintillating performance by Sinead Cusack, who plays Max's wife, Eleanor.

Dying from cancer, she presents her tumour-shot body to Max in the most affecting sequence of the night. Max has always believed in the power of group consciousness; Eleanor, facing a wholly personal tragedy, counters this in a searing defence of the individual.

"My body is telling me I'm nothing without it, and you're the same . . . Who's the me who's still in one piece?" she demands, ripping off her shirt to expose her mastectomy scars.

By the end, Havel runs a liberated Czech Republic and the Stones play Prague. In a final tableau the cast is transported to the Jagger-frenzied yelling ovation of a live gig. Politics meets pop, long live rock'n'roll. But something about the play's hectoring nature meant I wasn't thrillingly carried along with the beat.
thanks, Uke!

Revolution in the head
John Peter - The Sunday Times
June 18, 2006

Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll is a radical triumph, says John Peter

Tom Stoppard has written one of the great political plays in the English language, and like all great political plays, it resonates with humanity. It has a moving, throat-catching intensity that reminds me of Arthur Miller summing up Tennessee Williams’s plays as “the politics of the soul”. Stoppard has always been a hard-line humanist, and this play shows him at his combative and tolerant best. Proust thought that art was the true last judgment, which is pushing it a bit, but Stoppard shows that great theatre is the nearest you can get to it on this bitch of an earth.

The play is set in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. Max (Brian Cox) is a philosophy don and an old-fashioned communist who didn’t leave the party in 1956, when Khruschev crushed the Hungarian revolution, or in 1968, when Brezhnev crushed the Prague Spring. Max despises the idea of a “reformed” communist; he believes in basic premises and cannot see that dictatorships will lead only to some fraudulent and murderous utopia.

Jan (Rufus Sewell) is his pupil, an émigré Czech and a hard-line idealist who returns to Prague in 1968 to defend the socialism of his dreams. He is also a rock’n’roll junkie devoted to a Czech band called Plastic People of the Universe. He goes home partly to save rock’n’roll. What he doesn’t realise is that the commissars who rule his country regard the PPU’s work as “socially negative music”. Negative is bad news. You can be arrested for being negative. Positive is good news: a code word for following party directives. Soviet communism was an example of illogical positivism. Jan will have to learn the hard way.

The play has two great themes. One is the cost of integrity. Max can’t accept the failure of his ideals: it would be defeatism that would turn disaster into moral victory. Jan, back in Prague and still optimistic, thinks that signing a protest would be moral exhibitionism. The other theme is the nature of freedom. Max’s wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), is a classicist, and through her you hear the echoes of ancient mythologies: the great god Pan, for example, whose music is an instrument of liberation and pleasure. He is the ancestor of the popular music of the late 20th century. Rock’n’roll and its siblings were a shout for freedom: freedom from convention and an oppressive bourgeois lifestyle. In communist Prague, you had no lifestyle. Life was all you could hope for. Here, rock’n’roll meant defiance, a cry for the freedom to be yourself. This play could have been called The Invention of Freedom.

Stoppard doesn’t take sides. He once said that writing dialogue was the only way he could contradict himself, and here he demonstrates the power of the dramatist who can enter the mind of his characters and conduct that inner dialogue of mind and soul through which we try to understand the world. This is not a play reserved for classicists, philosophers or political scientists. It echoes with Stoppard’s humour: sad, acid, elegant and subversive. Under and through its arguments beats the steady pulse of humanity, of the accountability people need to have for themselves and each other. One thing Eleanor learns from the classics is that there’s a spirit within man that opposes him being just machinery. Max, Marxist to the core, thinks that love is only economics and physiology, but Eleanor knows better. She knows that you can have subjective experience in an objective world. If there’s no soul, it would have to be invented. This is what drives the harrowing scene between Max and Eleanor in the second half — the emotional peak of the play, where Cox and Cusack are at the peak of their unforgettably human performance.

Trevor Nunn’s production is a masterpiece of lucidity, intelligence and feeling. The showman of theatrical spectacle has done some of his best work on small stages, where intimacy can best reveal the soul about which Max is so robustly sceptical, and of which the great god Pan is an unacknowledged guardian. So were Pink Floyd when they defied the logical positivists and sang: “I don’t care if the sun don’t shine.”

MetroLife: Rock 'n' Roll
Claire Allfree - Metro.co.uk
Friday, June 16, 2006

Tom Stoppard's new play spans the history of Czechoslovakia from the 1968 Russian occupation to the dawn of an uneasy new freedom in 1990. Along the way it takes in feminism, the evolution of political dissent, Syd Barrett and the incantatory spirit of rock music.

Lurching from year to year, each marked by a different rock song, the play is, riskily, a sequence of platforms for intellectual debate. Cutting back and forth between Cambridge and Czechoslovakia, it pits various competing ideologies through a series of arguments, notably between Max - a Cambridge lecturer and dyed-in-the-wool Communist, and Jan, who studied Marxism with Max at Cambridge and returned to his Czechoslovakian homeland in 1967.

What keeps the momentum going is the way in which Stoppard shapes his characters through the gradual shifting of their political positions. Brian Cox's fearsome Max is a fundamentalist who refuses to accept that communism's failures are more significant than its successes. Yet he mourns the dissemination of the protest movement to the extent that at one point he considers voting for Thatcher in order that the real issues may be kept in focus.

In contrast, Jan initially believes not in political protest but in rock music, which he perceives to be the greatest force for freedom because it doesn't signify anything beyond itself. But gradually he becomes a dissident in response to Soviet authoritarianism. Under Trevor Nunn's direction, this fizzes with intellectual zip but would veer dangerously close to dramatic inertia and a certain thematic randomness if it weren't for an excellent ensemble cast, including Sinead Cusack and a superlatively humane performance from Rufus Sewell as Jan. Best of all, however, is its unsentimental celebration of rock music as an embodiment of hope.

CZECHS AND BALANCES
Tom Stoppard on Prague’s rock revolution.
by JOHN LAHR
The New Yorker
The Theatre
Issue of 2006-07-24
Posted 2006-07-17
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/theatre/articles/060724crth_theatre

“Hail, hail, rock ’n’ roll / Deliver me from the days of old,” Chuck Berry sang in the late fifties. From the outset, the rollicking beat of rock music was seen as transformative. The sound cast an irresistible spell over the imaginations of the young, for whom it was a call to action, to rebellion, and to ecstasy, not necessarily in that order. In a time of cultural turmoil and high anxiety, corrupting the world with pleasure was rock and roll’s messianic mission. But even the philosophes of fun couldn’t have predicted just how wild a ride the music would engineer on the world’s stage. Tom Stoppard, in his latest intellectual piñata, “Rock ’n’ Roll” (transferring from London’s Royal Court to the Duke of York’s on July 22nd), which is set in Cambridge and Prague between 1968 and 1990, contrives to look at music from the perspectives of both the West and the East.

Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Straüssler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, arrived in England, via Singapore and India, in 1946, a nine-year-old refugee from the Nazis. “I put on Englishness like a coat,” he told the Independent recently. “It fitted me and it suited me.” Now a knight of the realm, and revered as one of his generation’s most important playwrights, Stoppard has been amply rewarded by the culture he adopted. Although he has written more than twenty plays and numerous scripts for film and television, “Rock ’n’ Roll” is only his second attempt to imagine himself back in the Czech landscape. The first was “Professional Foul,” an excellent 1977 TV play, which dealt with a soccer-loving professor of ethics whose moral horizons are widened by the false arrest of a former student. In “Rock ’n’ Roll,” those widening horizons belong to Jan (the outstanding Rufus Sewell), a twenty-nine-year-old Czech Marxist scholar who in 1968 leaves the doctoral program at Cambridge “to save socialism” at home by supporting the liberal agenda of the Communist leader Alexander Dubc(ek.

In the eyes of his rebarbative British tutor Max Morrow (the fiery Brian Cox), who calls himself “the last white rhino,” Jan is a “bed-wetter.” Max is a hard-line Communist who thinks that Czechoslovakia’s “going it alone is going against the alliance.” He has no truck with Dubc(ek, “a reform Communist,” as Jan calls him—“Like a nun who gives blow jobs is a reform nun,” Max sneers. Max is a true believer in the U.S.S.R. “If it wasn’t for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country’d be a German province now—and you wouldn’t be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss everywhere except the toilet, you’d be smoke up the chimney,” he says. Max believes that the mind is “a biological machine” and that “the struggle was for socialism under organized labour and that was that. It wasn’t a revolution of the head.”

Max’s faith is in collective social justice; Jan, as his love of rock music indicates, is ravished by the notion of individual freedom. Max won’t have any of it: not the nineteen-sixties (“I was embarrassed by the sixties,” he says in 1990. “It was like opening the wrong door in a highly specialized brothel”) or the newfangled Euro-Communism (“Why call it Communism? . . . If I said to you, ‘I’m a Euro-vegetarian, so I’m allowed lamb chops,’ would you . . . laugh in my face?”). “Altering the psyche has no effect on the social structure,” Max argues. Stoppard surrounds the materialist old bull with a number of intellectual picadors who prod and exhaust him with their romantic idealism. Max’s cancer-ridden wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a classics professor who reminds her students that Eros means “uncontrollable, uncageable,” uses her body to refute his reason. “They’ve cut, cauterised, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished,” she tells him. “I am exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body.” Lenka (Nicole Ansari), one of Eleanor’s students, who takes up with Max after he is widowed, tells him, “To you consciousness is subversive—because your thing is the collective mind. But politics is over. You’re looking for revolution in the wrong place.”

Rock and roll legislates by joy, not by reason, which is why Stoppard opens his play with an image of Pan—a tousled youth playing the flute to a stoned teen-age hippie girl—and why the Czech state banned rock as “socially negative music.” The focus of state censorship fell, in particular, on the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band of anarchist artists who were driven underground and whose trial made a sensational shambles of the Communist regime. “The Plastics don’t care at all,” Jan says, explaining the band’s subversive appeal to a dissident friend. “They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans.” (When “Rock ’n’ Roll” is made into a movie—Mick Jagger is reportedly interested in acquiring the rights—the Plastics will likely be at the center of the story. Onstage, like so much else in the play, their plight is narrated but not dramatized.) Eventually, rock music and its musicians were the catalyst for Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution. At the finale of the play, Jan is on his feet in the Prague stadium where the Communists formerly held their rallies, cheering the Rolling Stones. By then, a lot of blood has flowed under the bridge; Jan has lived through loyalty pledges, purges, unemployment, imprisonment as a “parasite,” and rehabilitation as a bakery worker. As the Stones bring the curtain down—“Hey, hey, you got me rocking now / Hey, hey, there ain’t no stopping me”—Jan’s amazement at his hard-won liberty is something that the smug Western audience also feels. This is a considerable theatrical achievement.

The problem with “Rock ’n’ Roll,” however, is that dramaturgically speaking it doesn’t rock. Stoppard at his best—in “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” and “Arcadia”—is capable of inspired imaginative flights, thrilling grooves of verbal and scenic surprise. But that swift, irrepressible interplay of form and feeling is not in evidence here. The play, which is sluggishly directed by Trevor Nunn, can’t quite find its beat. Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, the Beach Boys, and Guns N’ Roses, among others, provide pertinent segues between scenes, but they serve only to underline the sedateness of the action onstage. We don’t really care about Max’s family or about Jan, because the focus never lingers long enough for us to know them; we understand the plot points of their lives and their psychologies, but these function more like factors in an intellectual equation than as emotional experience. Toward the end of the play, for instance, Jan returns to England for Max’s seventieth birthday and to make peace with the past. When he leaves, he says a wistful goodbye to Max’s daughter, Esme (also played by Cusack), the hippie girl we saw in the first scene, who has gone from a commune to motherhood and then to aimless middle age. This is the first time the two have met as adults. Jan exits, and minutes later reënters:

JAN: I came to ask, will you come with me?
ESME: Yes.
JAN: To Prague.
ESME: Of course. Yes. Of course.
JAN: Will you come now?
ESME:
Yes. All right. I’ll have to get my passport. . . . It’s upstairs.

The flatness of the exposition makes notional the drama of two resigned, disappointed souls finding each other; they become mere stick figures, their depth sacrificed to design. Real rock and roll goes straight to the heart; the play, however, is an appeal to the head.

“Rock ’n’ Roll” is bookended by two haunting images of collapse: that of Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, who suffered a mental breakdown in the late sixties, and who features in the play as a reclusive offstage figure living (as the real Barrett did until his death earlier this month) in Cambridge; and that of the Iron Curtain. Both collapses—one internal, one external; one negative, one positive—embody rock music’s youthful call for rebirth. Just how well this protean spirit was woven into the fabric of the new Czech order is shown in one piquant entry on the time line that Stoppard includes with the published text of the play. “1990. January,” it reads. “The Czech government appoints Frank Zappa, the American rock musician, as Czechoslovakia’s representative of trade, culture and tourism; later rescinded as ‘over-enthusiastic.’ ”