Rock ‘n’ Roll
by Tom Stoppard
dir. Chris Honer
Manchester Library Theatre
13th Feb 2009 – 14th Mar 2009
Max is an old-school Marxist intellectual. Jan is his rock-loving PhD student, returning to his native Prague in ’68 just as the Soviet invasion rolls in. Rather than protest or consent to sign his mates’ petitions, Jan puts his whole faith in the power of sitting alone in his flat listening to popular American and British albums. Consequently, despite having tasted the good life in England, his patience for two decades of ‘normalization’ begins to wear thin only when the Soviet threat extends to the performance rights of his favourite anglophone Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe. Trying to see them in concert, he lands a brief stint in prison. Returning home to a pile of broken vinyl and with his long hair shorn, Jan emerges at last as the soothing voice of anti-communism at the heart of this play, and thus the only sensible foil for old Max upon his inevitable return to Cambridge.
It’s hardly worth criticizing the parasitical relationship of this scenario to its source material. This is Stoppard, after all. Quick—name two things he’s written that don’t hinge on some specific historical or literary context. There’s nothing inherently faulty about such structures – Hamlet itself was born of a bit of research, of course – but the lingering question, and the perhaps Eliotan measure which still seems most usefully employed, is how much this new construction brings to the table – whether in the form of comment or aesthetic ‘synthesis’. In the case of Rock ‘n’ Roll, I’d say very little.
In an interview included in the programme, Stoppard says if the play was meant to comment on the historical material, he’d have written an essay instead. Maybe he should have. His loatheness to engage with and interrogate his sources – which ought to have been at least somewhat close to the bone for a native Czech – says plenty. Refusing the spine to hang them on, references to Syd Barrett and Sappho – meant to be poignant or symbolic in and of themselves, I suppose – carry no more weight than the paint-by-numbers backdrop of the Prague Spring.
The entire plot banks on such easy and unquestioned binaries, especially with the supposed tension between Max’s ‘Communism For Dummies’ (never differentiated from Stalinism) and Jan’s platitudes about ‘democracy’. In one of several place-holding sub-plots, comrade Max is similarly called on to parrot hard-line (‘biological machine’) cognitive psychology against his poor wife’s Romanticist lament for her cancer-ridden breasts. So it’s mind v. body; head v. heart; old v. young; East v. West; and the men can debate all these so reasonably while the ladies are left mostly to their mysticisms. Max, his wife, and Jan are flagged up as real intellectuals by flights of jargonese, but I’m not sure that necessitates the extreme lack of self-awareness displayed in their spats, the reductive set-ups of which make little space for actual drama.
The second half is slightly better than the first, if only because the needless introductions to these concepts are out of the way. The acting in this production is quite good, but it’s hard to tell. The dynamics which Hilton McRae is forced to superimpose on Max’s two-dimensions are unfortunate at times, though the blame lies mostly with the play itself, the final insignificance of which blares at every unwieldy scene change as the audience is left in the dark with Stoppard’s feigned sense of the eponymous genre.