Review: Tom Stoppard Eyes 1960s in 'Rock 'N' Roll'

Nov 05, 06:17 AM

Current Headlines: By Linda Winer, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Nov. 5--In retrospect, American rebellion in the '60s fell into two surprisingly tidy categories: the music people for whom radical politics was the background, and the political people for whom the music was the soundtrack of social change.

In "Rock 'n' Roll," Tom Stoppard's latest extreme-sport expedition to the jagged coasts of Utopia, a Czech philosophy student named Jan is definitely one of the music-equals-humanity people. Like Stoppard, Jan escaped the Nazis as a baby and was educated in England. Unlike this most brilliantly British of theatrical provocateurs, Jan went back to Prague after the Soviet tanks crushed Alexander Dubcek's "velvet revolution" in 1968.

Max -- brain-science professor, Communist Party member and part of the family that has sponsored him at Cambridge -- wants to know why. Jan, not entirely kidding, says he's going home to save rock-and-roll.

At its heady living-history best, "Rock 'n' Roll" is a direct and worthy descendent of "The Coast of Utopia," the nine-hour epic about pre-revolutionary Russian idealism, which won a record (for a play) seven Tony Awards last season. And in the deepest moments, the new play touches the pop-music nerve pathways of "The Real Thing," Stoppard's 1982 masterwork about a disintegrating marriage.

Yet for a work described as Stoppard's most personal, "Rock 'n' Roll" feels strangely distant -- as if, this time, his wit and ever-dazzling erudition actually are being used to throw us off the track more than they tempt us to follow him. We do, of course, because lesser Stoppard still is better than most plays written in the past 50 years. But the thrill is more like work this time.

This may be the problem of Trevor Nunn's celebrated production, which opened last night at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre with most of the London cast. With "Coast of Utopia," American director Jack O'Brien found the great warmth, immediacy and coherence that Nunn's original staging lacked.

Still, Rufus Sewell (Jan), Brian Cox (Max) and Sinead Cusack (Max's wife, and later their grown former flower-child daughter) splendidly personify the contrasting beliefs in consciousness and Communism. Sewell, his dark intelligence riveted in his eerily translucent eyes, transforms from bright young academic with a Czech-accented English to haunted political prisoner to contented adult in even more ways than he changes hair styles, which is a lot.

As Stoppard knows, the hair is much more than fashion. Like the outlaw musicians of a band called the Plastic People of the Universe (after a Frank Zappa song), Jan's adoration of "socially negative music" is considered as dangerous as the political dissent of Vaclav Havel. Jan believes that "living free" means the freedom "to be left alone." Max, played with poignant bow-wow ferocity by Cox, has devoted his life to the unsullied Communist ideal that freedom means "give me a chance."

Stoppard takes us from 1968 to 1990, through Havel's triumph and the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Shot through the changes are the sounds of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground and, especially, Pink Floyd -- all credited in scrupulous, ultimately tiresome detail on the scrim during scene changes. Wouldn't the music of the Plastic People have had more impact than this rock iconography?

Woven into the rises and falls and rises of creativity, oppression and capitalism is the story of Syd Barrett (real name Roger Keith), cofounding genius and famous dropout of Pink Floyd. Esme (Alice Eve), Max's flower-child daughter, believes he is Pan. Her vision is as easily dismissed as her "peace and love" exclamations -- until neither can be ignored.

For all the music, the stimulating and esoteric references, the shifts back and forth between Cambridge to Prague as wedges on a turntable (generically designed by Robert Jones), what we most remember are the women played by the remarkable Cusack. As Eleanor, classics professor and Max's cancer-ravaged wife, Cusack embodies the terror and the mysteries of consciousness. As she teaches about an Eros perceived by Sappho as an uncontainable force, she pleads with her husband to recognize the mind as something beyond "your amazing biological machine."

Stoppard makes us think about the relativity of happiness and the commodifying allure of capitalism, so adaptive it can sell mail-order socks with hammers and sickles. Ultimately, however, when the Stones concert in Prague is sponsored by Anheuser Busch, we're not sure Stoppard wants us to laugh or weep.

ROCK 'N' ROLL. By Tom Stoppard, directed by Trevor Nunn. Bernard Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St. Tickets: $76.50- 98.50. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Thursday preview.

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