Last Updated on January 10, 2024
Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play restaged at Hampstead Theatre
Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’N’ Roll first stormed onto the London stage in 2006. Restaging a play always raises the question of whether it remains relevant to contemporary times. Directed by Nina Raine, who previously directed her own play Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre, Rock ‘N’ Roll is sometimes considered to be one of Stoppard’s finest plays. Considering his brilliant oeuvre including Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties, Jumpers, and Hapgood, as well as a host of awards, Rock ‘N’ Roll has a lot to live up to. Set between the Soviet repression of the 1968 Prague Spring and the freedom ushered in by the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the play explores the confluence of politics, music and family history.
Three generations of the family of Max, a Cambridge Marxist professor intersect with Jan, a rock ‘n’ roll loving dissident from Communist Czechoslovakia who is a PhD student at Cambridge. On a musical level, Pink Floyd has just dumped Syd Barrett. When the Soviet tanks roll in, Jan returns home to Prague with his suitcase full of music deemed ‘socially negative’. The records, symbolising a freedom Jan believes will continue to survive, are systematically destroyed by the security services as the years roll by and repression increases. Eventually, he is left with one lone album, The Beach Boys. 21 years lapse during which we trace developments in Max’s family life as well as Jan’s involvement in the dissident movement in a Communist police state. Throughout these decades, Max, remains a die-hard Marxist, an easier position to adopt, perhaps, living amidst the freedom of expression and movement in England, for which Jan longs.
Music forms part of the plot as well as being part of the uplifting soundscape of the play. Under Communism in Czechoslovakia, the dissident group, The Plastic People of the Universe, was arrested at a music festival in 1976 and inspired the rise of Charter 77, a human rights petition. Following the Velvet Revolution, the Rolling Stones played to an enormous crowd in Prague. Rock ‘N’ Roll has a fantastic playlist which accompanies scene changes and lifts the serious tone of the play at times, especially in the final scene.
Despite some strong performances – special mention to Nancy Carroll who brought an exuberant emotion to the stage with her spirited and affecting performance as both mother, Eleanor, and her daughter, Esme – the play never achieved lift-off. This is partly due to the rather stolid polemic which felt both dated and dry. The first half was particularly laden with long diatribes with flashes of humour that might have been more liberally sprinkled. There was a more humane, lighter touch in dialogue written for the female parts even when a tutorial on Sappho was on the go. The second half of the play brought a brighter energy – although Stoppard seemed to be unable to restrain himself and, just as the action and human interest were rising, he lapsed back into rhetoric and debate that seemed straight out of a Cambridge tutorial.
Nathaniel Parker was convincing as Max, a man both as pompous and bullish in his ideological certainties as he is delighted by his intellectual pontificating. He begins to resemble a political dinosaur who is finally rendered more human through grief and the frailties of ageing. Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) was the student who returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 from Cambridge to save Socialism only to become disillusioned and persecuted by the authorities. He longs for England and finally returns for a heart-to-heart with Max with whom he has had a testy relationship due to political differences. In the final scene, Jan finally comes to life as a character and displays a light playfulness which is charming.
Traverse staging did not enhance this production as much of the time at least one important character had their back to one side of the audience. I find that this leaves me feeling disconnected from the characters as I cannot see their face and I lose some of the dialogue too. In one of the play’s pivotal scenes – and certainly the most emotionally engaging – when a dying Eleanor rips her dress in her rage against her cancer, her husband and her foreshortened life, she had her back to where I was seated which was most frustrating.
In an interview with The Guardian, Stoppard was asked about the relevance of his play in 2023 and stated that he did not much care about this. He thought that relevance does not enter the minds of an audience. I am not so sure about that. A play about an historical period and the debates that raged at the time might always be interesting, but this production lacks dynamism.
Rock ’N’ Roll is on at Hampstead Theatre until 27 January 2024
Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage NW3 3EU
