Rock ‘n’ Roll, typically of Tom Stoppard’s plays, is a bit—or a lot—overstuffed. He maintains that at its heart, it’s a love story, but the audience might be forgiven for not realizing that until the last half hour or so.
A story of cultural and political revolution from 1968’s Prague Spring to the end of Soviet occupation in 1980, it includes digressions (or are they fundamental points?) about fragments of Sappho, the mind/body problem, the difference between dissent and moral exhibitionism, Syd Barrett (who may or may not be the great god Pan), and, of course, the significance of rock ‘n’ roll.
Much as I looked forward to the current production at the Hampstead Theatre, I didn’t find it hitting me as hard as it did when I first saw it 15 years ago. I’m surprised to find that it feels more dated than it did in 2008.
Surprised because the conflict between individualism and authoritarianism has not gone away, merely taken on new identities since 2008. And the play’s governing idea, that artists who refuse to bow to the ruling regime can provide the most effective kind of resistance, is a powerful one. But Stoppard certainly makes us work to feel this conflict and how it shapes his characters and his play.
The central problem, perhaps, is that the music of the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, or Pink Floyd, though revolutionary in their time, now communicate more nostalgia than rebellion.
And so we’re missing some of the emotional energy Stoppard wants the music to make us feel throughout the play, whose scenes are divided by what he calls “smash cuts,” blackouts (or low light, as in this production) accompanied by cuts of rock music from the period.
Still, there are the pleasures that always come with Stoppard. The wit, for example, as when Jan tells his mentor Max that he would love to be English:
To be English would be my luck. I would be moderately enthusiastic and moderately philistine, and a good sport. I would be kind to foreigners in a moderately superior way, and also to animals except for the ones I kill, and I would live a decent life, like most English people.
Or Stoppard’s intellectual generosity in granting some of the play’s best arguments to characters he disagrees with. The unrepentant communist Max, for example, refuses to break with the Soviets. When Jan tells him how he once told students at his school that people in England can live anywhere they please, Max responds:
And you didn’t explain? … How English society works. How everyone’s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it’s absolutely legal to be unemployed.
Max, too, provides a deeply human account for his refusal to break with communism:
A workers’ state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work. What the hell else?
Indeed, what the hell else? Myself, I would turn to Hannah Jarvis in Arcadia, who suggests a different foundation for our lives:
It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise, we’re going out the way we came in.
In Rock ‘n’ Roll, it’s Max’s wife Eleanor who lives a life more like Arcadia’s Hannah. A classicist dying of cancer, she desperately seeks the comfort from her husband that his materialist philosophy is unable to give. In the most emotionally powerful moment of the play, she begs for his grieving soul to come to her funeral, not the amazing materialist machine he understands our minds to be.
It’s what will keeps me coming back to Stoppard: both the ideas and the bursts of emotional truth. Amidst all the history, the Marxism, the music, the fragments of Sappho, the question he makes us confront is how are we to live.
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