It's Only Stoppard's 'Rock 'n' Roll'
In "Rock 'n' Roll," a play that has already been praised to the heavens from its 2006 London debut to its current Broadway run, Tom Stoppard unleashes a fusillade of intellectual arguments with the beat, swagger, and authority of the world's most galvanizing groups. Stoppard, who now ranks among England's greatest playwrights, was born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia; and "Rock 'n' Roll," which pits communism's materialist focus against rock's revolution of consciousness, is both an especially personal work as well as something of a relief, after the rigors of "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy.
Stoppard focuses his ambivalences about East and West through Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Marxist scholar who returns to Prague from swinging Cambridge in 1968 in order to support communist leader Alexander Dubcek's liberal initiatives. Jan's experience there over the next couple of decades is contrasted to the less politically oppressive, but no less personally fraught, life of Jan's former teacher, Max Morrow (Brian Cox), and his family. When Jan returns in 1990, Czechoslovakia is better while England feels in decline. So Jan whisks Max's daughter back to Prague for a Rolling Stones concert.
Stoppard uses rock music (including Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, U2, and the Cure) as increasingly less potent touchstones for the times. The tragic figure of Syd Barrett, the Pink Floyd co-founder who died last year in Cambridge after nearly four decades' mental illness, even stands in for the fall of communism. Meanwhile, the Plastic People of the Universe have been suffering in Prague, along with Jan, until reemerging to enjoy the Velvet Revolution of 1989. This group's music is far less heard than discussed in the play, which tosses around bucketfuls of ideas about politics and society with the laugh-line pace of a TV sitcom. This fine play deserves a better production, but don't let that stop you from czeching it out.