MORE STOPPARD/ROCK & ROLL

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 Tomá? 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 Dub?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 Dub?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.’ ”

...from John Lahr at NEW YORKER