|
|
 |
|
Written
by
Tom Stoppard
Director
Trevor Nunn
Set Design
Robert Jones
Costume
Design
Emma
Ryott
Lighting
Design
Howard
Harrison
Sound
Design
Ian Dickinson
Rufus
Sewell
Jan
David
Calder
Max Calder
Sinead
Cusack
Esme/Eleanor
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Duke
of York's Theatre
13
Oct - 25 Feb 2006 |
|
Anyone
who saw Trevor Nunn's sublime
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, which
also included Rufus Sewell,
should be rubbing their hands
with glee in anticipation
of Rock 'n' Roll, Stoppard's
new play about Communism in
Cambridge and Czechoslovakia.
The same trio, with wonderful
performances by Sinead Cusack
and David Calder, are together
again. There are the usual
jokes and cleverness, the
classical allusions and the
plot that straddles place
and time that you have come
to expect from the Master;
but...
Max (Calder), a veteran communist
don at Cambridge, married
to Eleanor (Cusack), also
a don but suffering from cancer,
are in the thick of the 60s
with a hippy daughter, Esme,
and a young Czech friend and
pupil, Jan (Sewell). To the
frustration of Max, everyone
is more interested in peace,
love, rock and roll than the
purity of his ideology. With
the collapse of the Prague
Spring, Jan perversely decides
to return to his homeland
armed with a suitcase of vinyl
and a belief that Rock 'n'
Roll and a willingness to
compromise will somehow set
everything straight. Disillusion
sets in as the years pass
in both Cambridge, where Thatcherism
comes to rule and illness
and death intrude, and in
Prague, where the bullying
vindictiveness of the Husak
government takes its toll
on Jan and his friends.
Throughout, Rock
'n' Roll
is the liet
motif
with each scene change accompanied
by music, a music that slowly
focuses on Pink Floyd in Cambridge
and The Plastic People of
the Universe in Czechoslovakia.
There is a further tightening
of the focus on the persona
of Syd Barrett, a founder
of Pink Floyd but lost to
drug-induced psychosis and
living in Cambridge as an
offstage presence. The Plastic
People, as Stoppard comments
in the programme, did not
consider themselves dissidents;
but the rock 'n' roll lifestyle
that they embodied was, in
itself, dissident and incompatible
with an iron ideology that
demanded conformity in everything.
Culture, as he says, is politics.
As a generation passes, Jan
comes back to Cambridge in
the late 80s to be reunited
with a grown up Esme (also
played by Cusack) and an old
Max mellowed into acceptance
of defeat and a realisation
that decency has a problem
emerging out of the clash
of theory and practice. Rock
'n' Roll triumphs in the end
when the Rolling Stones play
at the very epicentre of past
oppression in Prague.
All the roles are well drawn
and acted, with Sewell an
excellent Jan but with an
accent that meandered unnervingly
in the earlier scenes, leaving
an uncomfortable feeling that
one had missed a twist in
the plot or chronology. The
narrowness of the Duke of
York stage lends itself well
to the suffocating atmosphere
of a repressed Prague but
is overbearing in the scenes
of Cambridge summer days.
Small stuff. So why the butÖ?
Perhaps the play suffers from
the weight of expectation,
rightly high from the greats
of the theatre. At the centre,
however, is the proposition
that Rock 'n' Roll is a force
for change and hope, not only
in a country leached of freedom
and decency but also in the
west, in the ultimately bourgeois
world of Max, Eleanor and
Esme: understandable from
the viewpoint of an ÈmigrÈ,
but portentous to an English
audience. After all, it's
only Rock 'n' Roll.
Charles Ellingworth |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
