{"id":1465,"date":"2009-02-21T20:51:58","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T19:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=326"},"modified":"2016-02-05T19:38:02","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:38:02","slug":"rock-n-roll-tom-stoppard-manchester-library-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1465","title":{"rendered":"<em>Rock &#8216;n&#8217; Roll<\/em>, Tom Stoppard, The Library Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll<br \/>\nby Tom Stoppard<br \/>\ndir. Chris Honer<br \/>\nManchester Library Theatre<br \/>\n13th Feb 2009 \u2013 14th Mar 2009<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Max is an old-school Marxist intellectual. Jan is his rock-loving PhD student, returning to his native Prague in \u201968 just as the Soviet invasion rolls in. Rather than protest or consent to sign his mates\u2019 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 \u2018normalization\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hardly worth criticizing the parasitical relationship of this scenario to its source material. This is Stoppard, after all. Quick\u2014name two things he\u2019s written that don\u2019t hinge on some specific historical or literary context. There\u2019s nothing inherently faulty about such structures \u2013 Hamlet itself was born of a bit of research, of course \u2013 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 \u2013 whether in the form of comment or aesthetic \u2018synthesis\u2019. In the case of Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll, I\u2019d say very little.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In an interview included in the programme, Stoppard says if the play was meant to comment on the historical material, he\u2019d have written an essay instead. Maybe he should have. His loatheness to engage with and interrogate his sources \u2013 which ought to have been at least somewhat close to the bone for a native Czech \u2013 says plenty. Refusing the spine to hang them on, references to Syd Barrett and Sappho \u2013 meant to be poignant or symbolic in and of themselves, I suppose \u2013 carry no more weight than the paint-by-numbers backdrop of the Prague Spring.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The entire plot banks on such easy and unquestioned binaries, especially with the supposed tension between Max\u2019s \u2018Communism For Dummies\u2019 (never differentiated from Stalinism) and Jan\u2019s platitudes about \u2018democracy\u2019. In one of several place-holding sub-plots, comrade Max is similarly called on to parrot hard-line (\u2018biological machine\u2019) cognitive psychology against his poor wife\u2019s Romanticist lament for her cancer-ridden breasts. So it\u2019s 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s hard to tell. The dynamics which Hilton McRae is forced to superimpose on Max\u2019s 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\u2019s feigned sense of the eponymous genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll by Tom Stoppard dir. Chris Honer Manchester Library Theatre 13th Feb 2009 \u2013 14th Mar 2009 \u00a0 Max is an old-school Marxist intellectual. Jan is his rock-loving PhD student, returning to his native Prague in \u201968 just as the Soviet invasion rolls in. Rather than protest or consent to sign his mates\u2019 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Rock &#039;n&#039; Roll, Tom Stoppard, The Library Theatre - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1465\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rock &#039;n&#039; Roll, Tom Stoppard, The Library Theatre - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll by Tom Stoppard dir. 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