Being wary of anything with the words "Rock'n'Roll" applied to it, it was only Tom Stoppard's reputation that propelled me to the Duke of York's Theatre in London at the end of last year to see his recent play.

Waiting for the curtain to go up, I decided that my dislike of the term had hardened due the incessant repetition of the same canon of songs for the last thirty years on "Classic Rock" stations, but that it began with the release of "It's Only Rock and Roll" by the Rolling Stones. Although this song, and the record of the same name from which it came, coincided with a perception that the Stones were transitioning from being something vital and relevant into a spent force, worse from my point of view was the idea--stated in the title of the song--of rock music shorn of all idealism.

Rock and roll in Tom Stoppard's play is not shorn of idealism, which is, along with such things as Marxist dons at Cambridge and talk of trade unions, one of the elements that makes it seem nostalgic and about a distant era, even though the play is set between 1968 and 1990.

Dominic West is very likable as Jan, whose fondness of England is informed by his idyllic schoolboy years just after the Second World War. When the play begins, he is a doctoral student at Cambridge University. An academic, he is clever, like almost all of the other characters in the play, and argues well, but West is effective in suggesting something both sanguine and slightly bumbling in Jan's character.

 
Rufus Sewell as Jan.

Jan returns to Czechoslovakia after the Soviet tanks have rolled-in, but he is so enthused by the Velvet Underground that he is slow to see what has become of the Velvet Revolution.

In a scene set in 1969, Jan's best friend Ferdinand (based on Vaclav Havel) produces a petition protesting potential press censorship. Jan seems preoccupied with choosing the next record, and knowing what we know about events in Czechoslovakia, his justification for not signing the petition sounds so crass that it suggests self-deception on his part.

I was in the Music F Club where they had this amateur rock competition. The Plastic People of The Universe played "Venus in Furs," and I knew everything was basically okay.

Jan's interrogation after his return to Czechoslovakia is another scene in which Stoppard makes use of our knowing how events in the country turned out. It seems far more sinister and disquieting to us than it does to him. The sense of menace in the encounter is evoked by the offer of a biscuit. Who better than Stoppard to demonstrate how a few banal words can be wielded as an instrument of control?

Interrogator: But you haven't had a biscuit! Help yourself

Jan: Thanks. Actually, I won't have one.

Interrogator: You won't have one?

Jan: I mean, I don't want one, thank you.

Interrogator: Go on, have a biscuit, there's plenty.

Jan: It's all right

Interrogator: So have one. Jan takes a biscuit. The interrogator watches him eat it, smiling encouragingly. Good?

Jan: Lovely

Interrogator: Lovely? It's only a biscuit. They're a bit stale, actually, don't you think?

Jan: A bit

Interrogator: Lovely and stale, then, would you say?

Jan: If you like.

We discover that Jan was in Cambridge at the behest of the Czech government, so as to report on his mentor Max, who is a Marxist don. Against the governement's wishes, Jan chose to return. In this context, his request to have his record collection returned makes him sound like a little boy asking for his ball back, indicating that he doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, the danger that he is in.

Throughout the play what happens to Jan is linked with rock music, and in particular, with the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band covering songs by the "underground" rock bands Jan admires but who, unlike their western counterparts, are forced by the regime to become truly underground.

Mirroring Jan's earlier refusal to sign Ferdinand's petition, Ferdinand refuses to sign Jan's letter in support of Jirous, the Plastics' artistic director, who has been jailed for free expression, asking why people "working in boiler rooms and timberyards" should invite the police to arrest them, just so that the Plastics can do their own thing.

Jan's response to this question is central to the play. As his exuberant enthusiasm for rock music is tempered by events in Czechoslovakia, it coalesces into his mature views about artistic expression. Gradually, as his point of view becomes clearer, we begin to understand the distinction that he is making between the Plastic's non-conformity and Ferdinand’s political opposition.

Jan: The policeman's fear is what makes him angry. He's frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn't care. He doesn't care even enough to cut his hair. The policeman isn't frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith.

The year 1975 is represented by "It's Only Rock And Roll" although the scene that follows suggests very strongly that it isn't only rock and roll. Ferdinand explains that after having met Jirous in prison, his perspective on the Plastics has changed. Jirous tells him:

The tempter says, "Cut your hair just a little, and we'll let you play. Then the tempter says, "Just change the name of the band and you can play." And after that, "Just leave out this one song"...It is better not to start by cutting your hair--no it is necessary then nothing you do can possibly give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country.

Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell on set at London's Royal Court Theatre

Jirous also sees how this applies to the West, where the desire for recognition also leads to conformity, which is, inevitably, corrupting.  Other bands have better musicians, but the Plastics are the only band safe from the desire for recognition. In the alternative culture, success is failure. "Look at what happens in the West," Jirous warns.

The split between the scenes set in Czechoslovakia and those that take place in Cambridge is problematic, largely because rock and roll becomes the spine of the scenes set in Czechoslovakia. In these scenes the title of the play makes sense--everything seems to hinge on the fate of the Plastics--but in Cambridge it is much less central to what is going on. 

In the Cambridge scenes, it is Max and Eleanor's dippy, flower-child daughter Esme who mirrors Jan's immersion in music, but hers is a particular sort of passion for music, personified by Syd Barrett, Cambridge denizen, and sometime leader of the band Pink Floyd, who comes to personify music in these scenes for the rest of the play.

Sinead Cusack as Eleanor and Alice Eve as Esme in Tom Stoppard's Rock 'N Roll.

Esme is enchanted by music. The play begins with Esme spying Syd Barrett atop the garden wall singing 'Golden Hair' for her. When she relates what she has seen, she compares him to Pan playing his pipes. Syd Barrett, and music itself, is like the sort of magical figure who appears to you only when you are young and beautiful, and is invisible to the grown-ups.

This is a problem for a number of reasons. In Act One, the two dominant characters in the Cambridge scenes are Max and his wife, who don't listen to rock music, much less discuss it. Eleanor dies at the end of Act One, and Esme becomes the locus of Max's family, but her effort to reclaim her life after a misspent youth by hitting the books for the first time since the 1960s isn't as dramatic as Eleanor's struggle with cancer in the previous act, and even though Max seems more peripheral to the action in Act Two, because Esme's interest in music is of such a different type to Jan's, Max and his politics remain the only bridge to the scenes set in Czechoslovakia. 

In the second act, when Esme is a middle-aged woman, her references to him sound forlorn: sad because of what has become of him and sad because he represents her lost youth. When Jan, on a visit to Cambridge, says how wonderful it would be to see him, Esme tells Jan that he can't: Syd Barrett is reclusive and only her daughter Alice knows his whereabouts, keeping this knowledge safe from prying pilgrims--no one can see him. Stoppard's use of the Syd Barrett character is interesting. There is the sense of a magic cycle: Syd Barrett revealing himself first to Esme, and then to the daughter a generation later, but to use him to personify rock music in the Cambridge scenes has its disadvantages as well.

Stoppard might have used rock and roll, and the trajectory that it took in England over the years spanned by the play, both to make a bridge to the scenes in Czechoslovakia, and also to give a better context for Max and his politics. This choice was reinforced by the choice of tracks, which along with the song credits and date flashed up on a screen, announces the year in which the following scene takes place.

All of the songs are firmly in the classic rock canon--those same songs that I mentioned at the outset, which have been played over and over again on "Classic Rock" stations in the United States for the last thirty years. This works as a device in the Czech scenes because, like many other aspects of life in a communist country, rock music was frozen in time and Vaclav Havel (on whom Ferdinand is based) was, no doubt, still listening to Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones in the year of Charter 77 and still finding them relevant. 1977 was a year of upheaval in England too, but there--even in Cambridge--rock and roll music was a sensitive barometer of social change. This was the year that Johnny Rotten sang 'There is no future in England's dreaming,' but Stoppard announces 1977 with a Pink Floyd song. Even the tabloid press reflected the sense that bands like Pink Floyd were being supplanted by punk groups speaking more to the times, referring to the Rolling Stones in one memorable headline as "The Strolling Bones."

The music chosen to represent 1977 suggests a continuity which didn't exist in England, and along with the use of Syd Barrett as the personification of music, even in the years when rock and roll was an expression of extreme disenchantment not enchantment--well this seems like a sort of falsification. But more important, this choice undermines the play.

London's Royal Court Theatre.

Towards the end of the play Max bemoans the reelection of Margaret Thatcher, but along with punk music, the play skips over any reference to the period of disaffection that led to her rise to power. These were the years when England was a much more Socialist country, and this would have been fairer context in which to place Max and his Marxist views.

There are those would brand Max a hypocrite for living a life of privilege in Cambridge, and dismiss what he says about communism on these grounds alone. His defense of it is set against Eleanor's esoteric Sappho tutorials, and Max comes across as an implacable, bullying minority of one--a white rhino--and yet during the years covered by act one, there were other Marxist dons at Cambridge, and like Max, even if they weren't communists, a sizeable proportion of the population saw Socialism--back when the Labour party was a socialist part--as the best means to a more egalitarian society.

David Calder's Max is formidable and irascible, but this absence of context makes him seem like something of a crank, and the way that he is characterized makes what he says sound harsh. There is a caring compassionate side to the idea of a welfare state, but you wouldn't know that from anything that Max says. When Jan proclaims his love for England: Collecting birds' eggs in the countryside in summer, trial by jury, and the law for free speech, "the same for the highest and the lowest," Max snaps back: "For you, freedom means, leave me alone. For the masses it means, 'Give me a break.'"

Max is formidable, but Stoppard gives him an even more formidable wife. The most emotional moment in the play comes towards the end of Act One, when she brings Max to his knees (while demolishing Marxist materialism in the process).

Max: The brain is a biological machine for thinking. If it wasn't for the merely technical problem of how it works, we could make one out of--beer cans.

This is Eleanor's blistering riposte:

They've cut, cauterized and zapped away my breast, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished, I'm exactly who I have always been. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me is the truth of it… I don't want your 'mind' which you can make out of beer cans. Don't bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing.

Lacking the musical spine which runs through the Czech scenes, and without Eleanor, much of what happens in Cambridge during the second act, and the characters who populate it, seem inessential: There's Esme's former husband Nigel and his new wife, both journalists, whose main purpose in the play seems to be to allow Stoppard a couple of jabs at the media, and to provide Jan with an excuse for a bit of expository dialogue about what's going on in Czechoslovakia, and there's Lenka, Eleanor's Czech student who, for a time after Eleanor's death, becomes Max's lover.

By the time Max barters information with the Czech authorities so as to secure Jan's release from prison, even he is asking, "Is this what I was keeping faith for?"  

Czechoslovakia was forgotten. You had it all to yourselves. And simply out of annoyance, for the sake of venting your spite on a few drop-outs who were of no danger to you--no danger at all--you made a festival for the Western press to shit all over the idea that a better way is still possible and looks--despite everything--looks east to the source.

In Act Two, the Cambridge scenes devolve into a domestic drama with Esme at the center. In the process of trying to get back on the educational ladder, she is subjected to the humiliation of having a Sapphic stanza explained to her by her brilliant daughter Alice, suggesting that Alice has inherited the academic gene from her grandparents, in addition to her mother's magic connection with Syd Barrett. This leads to a lot of tum-ti, tum-ti's which I found irritating. I was also bothered by Stoppard's other references to Sappho and Plutarch, although I can see that these are not out of place in the Cambridge academic milieu. Perhaps this is prejudice on my part as I grew up in Cambridge without reading either Sappho or Plutarch in translation, let alone the original text. As a result, I have to confess to finding moments in the play undecipherable, which raises the age-old question as to whether a reference to something that a sizeable proportion of the audience is unlikely to understand is Stoppard's problem or theirs.

At other times, I found what was being said hard to follow, not because it depended on knowing something esoteric, but simply because it was too complex to catch "on the fly." 

The Greek poet Sappho first comes up in Eleanor’s tutorial with a prim rather pedestrian student. The same fragment is revisited in Eleanor's tutorial with Lenka. That Lenka uses her analysis of the fragment to make a play for Max is obvious, but even after rereading these passages several times, I can't understand what she is saying.

Lenka: So okay. But the subjective experience of the objective world when that world includes the poet is obviously paradoxical.

As the tying together of the two sides of the play depends on the death of Pan Plutarch reference before Esme, Jan, and Ferdinand all go to the Rolling Stones Prague concert in 1990, perhaps I shouldn’t sound too definitive about the way that the play concludes.

It is impossible to imagine the concert scene, foreshadowed early on in the play, taking place in the intervening years. It clearly marks the end of the communist era. Seen through the eyes of the characters, a Rolling Stones concert is imbued with the kind of significance that it would have been hard for me to imagine before seeing the play.

One of the incidental pleasures in seeing the play was in the rehabilitation of old heroes, and again feeling that rock and roll could be important. In that moment I had the feeling of, if not entirely recapturing the past, at least reconnecting with it in some small way, and I was left with the comforting feeling that the spirit of youth is never entirely lost.