The premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll”
<Published in the Financial Times on June 15, 2006>
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.
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.
@Financial Times
@Alastair Macaulay 2006