CT Blue

A first here at CtBlue: a guest writer.

I mentioned last week that my family went to see Tom Stoppard’s new (to the U.S.) play, Rock ‘N’ Roll, which is actually still in previews here after a run in London. My brother in law, Eric von Dorster, went with us and we prevailed upon him (he has a graduate degree in theatre and he’s a Yale major in English) to write a review. I mean, why not? The play is extremely political, and so is this blog. Stoppard is a rock ‘n’ roll fan, and so is this blog. So, we hereby venture into dramatic criticism with a review of Stoppard’s play:

On October 20, I accompanied the famed blogger John Wirzbicki and his lovely wife Mary (recent developments in journalism require me to identify her at this point as my sister) to a preview of the New York production of Tom Stoppard’s latest play Rock ’n’ Roll at the Jacob Theatre. Directed by Trevor Nunn and starring noted British actors Brian Cox, Rufus Sewell and Sinead Cusack, the play follows the lives of the denizens of Prague and Cambridge, England, from 1968 to 1990, the period during which Czechoslovakia faced a Russian invasion and its consequences.

Stoppard notes in his introduction to the printed text of the play the parallels between Jan (the main character) and himself:

He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came to England directly as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.

The playwright had dealt with Czech events in earlier works like the television play Professional Foul and a curious comedy, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, that pairs a school-boy fifteen-minute production of Hamlet performed in Dogg’s language with an underground production of Macbeth acted out in a Prague living room and interrupted by a sinister government agent. The character of Cahoot was based on Czech playwright Pavel Kohut. In Rock ’n’ Roll Stoppard imagines what his life might have been like had he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Russian invasion.

Into the historical events Stoppard has woven a family drama of three generations and a meditation on the revolutionary power of rock and roll. The play opens in Cambridge in 1968, with sixteen-year-old flower child Esme listening to a mysterious piper (later identified as Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd fame) singing ‘Golden Hair’. In a clever bit of casting, the actress playing the part will later play her teenaged daughter and the actress playing her mother (the brilliant Sinead Cusack) plays first her mother Eleanor and then Esme as an adult.

Esme’s father is Max (played with authority by Brian Cox) a British communist who sees the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as commendable. Supporting a noble theory he condones flaws in the resulting practice. He argues with his young Czech protégé Jan (played with great energy by Rufus Sewell), who decides to return to Prague to confront the Russian challenge, ending the heated discussion with, “Then fuck off back to Prague. Sorry about the tanks.” Max’s wife is Eleanor, a scholar of classical Greek whose lessons on Sappho throughout the play oppose Max’s rational point of view with untamed passion. She is recovering from a masectomy and in a scene later in the play rages against what she sees as her body’s betrayal.

After an abrupt blackout pierced with the Rolling Stones’ ‘It’s All Over Now’, the scene shifts to Prague, where Jan is being interrogated by a sinister government agent. The music that plays throughout the performance – a dozen or more rock classics from the period – is not just used to give life to the production. Jan soon becomes involved with the plight of a rock band from Prague called the Plastic People of the Universe, whose arrest led toprotests that precipitated the fall of the Russian-backed government. Ignoring ideology, the Plastic People just wanted to play their Zappa-inspired free-form music, sport long hair and live a liberated lifestyle. Brought back throughout the play is the life of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, who left the band following a battle with mental illness and went to live in Cambridge.

Stoppard weaves together these tales of politics, family crises and rock and roll seamlessly, showing how our daily lives are composed of such various concerns. We come to love the crusty ideologue Max and his idealistic pupil Jan, to worry about Eleanor’s medical condition and her daughter’s dilemma as offspring of intellectuals. By the final scene, at a Rolling Stones concert in Prague in 1990, as we watch Jan and Esme in the crowd, we too have experienced the roller coaster of events that have shaped their lives.

I should add, though, that for some in the audience a bitter taste lingered, the result of watching history roll by inexorably, both global and personal. Stoppard has given us a true picture of life, bittersweet life in which the joys and tragedies are both ever-present.

Eric von Dorster

I should add here that though Eric went to Yale, he actually did learn something there, as opposed to a certain President of the United States whose name shall go unspoken but who shall be an eternal blot on Yale and, for that matter, on this state which must bear the onus of being his birthplace. (Sorry, these insults to the Shrub are totally irrelevant to this piece and beneath even me. However, I can’t help myself and I’m leaving them in.)