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Rock and Roll at Canadian Stage. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

“Rock ‘n’ Roll”
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Donna Feore

At Canadian Stage until October 24
At The Citadel Theatre November 7-29

Reviewed by Rob Ormsby

Shaun Smyth as Jan and Kenneth Welsh as Max. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

While the current staging of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Bluma Appel might excite some comment about rock’s continuing revolutionary potential, the production is actually better at suggesting the music form’s complicity with establishment culture at the end of the twentieth century. 

Rock ‘n’ Roll covers the period from 1968 to 1990, cutting between the house of Cambridge don Max Morrow (Kenneth Welsh) and Communist Czechoslovakia, where Max’s Czech student Jan (Shaun Smyth) returns in 1968 after it seems possible that the country will be freed from its Soviet occupation. As is typical of Stoppard’s drama, Rock ‘n’ Roll delivers an invigorating clash of political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideologies, none of which prevail in any simple way.

Max is an unrepentant communist who dislikes the cruelty of Soviet totalitarianism but “recognizes” it as the only way to implement a Marxist Revolution and to work towards a just form of social organization. He berates Jan for returning to Prague and for preferring England (with its capitalist injustices) to a Warsaw Pact distopia/utopia. Jan does not put up much of a fight against the bullying professor but Max’s argument with wife Eleanor (Fiona Reid), a Cambridge classicist, is harder won. After Max pedantically boasts to Eleanor’s student Lenka (another Czech, played by Belinda Cornish) that the individual mind is nothing but a biological machine, Eleanor turns on him and forces him to admit that, although her cancer-ridden body has been cut apart, she remains the person she is; that her ‘true’ self is more than the sum of her bio-mechanical functions.

Fioa Reid as Eleanor and Kenneth Welsh as Max. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

The debate between the two does not come into focus because both Welsh and Reid struggle unsuccessfully to project their characters’ intellectual depth and toughness. Welsh’s Max is often merely petulant, expending his mental energy hissily and without a sense of hard-won philosophical convictions. Reid’s Eleanor is disconcertingly like her Mrs. Lovett in CanStage’s recent(ish) Sweeney Todd, taking a (perhaps unintentional) cockney jokiness and scatterbrained approach to Eleanor’s ostensibly profound specialist knowledge.  To be fair, I saw the show during its last preview, but neither Reid nor Welsh gave the impression that they could survive, much less trade, many barbs at an Oxbridge high table.

However, the strain of thought behind Eleanor’s interpretation of Sappho’s poetry, which represents the real threat to Max’s materialist rationalism, does gain traction in this production for reasons I will relate in a moment. Eleanor translates Sappho’s description of Eros—“amachanon”—as “unmachine,” which she understands as “Uncontrollable” or “Uncagaeable” (11). Jan takes up this argument back in Czechoslovakia, quarrelling with his dissident friend Ferdinand (Cyrus Lane) about the effectiveness of the unofficial “opposition” of individuals taking principled stands against the government. Jan tells Ferdinand that the secret police do not fear dissidents: “Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith” (37). Czech dictator Gustáv Husák knows that he and the dissidents are “playing on the same board” and “can relax, he’s made the rules, it’s his game” (37). But Jan insists that rock groups like the Czech Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) scare the police with their political indifference: “They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans” (37).

Shaun Smyth as Jan and Cyrus Lane as Ferdinand. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

Christopher Innes suggests that Rock ‘n’ Roll is part of a resurgence of “documentary” drama in the British theatre that is being undertaken by establishment practitioners like David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark, and Stoppard himself. Innes is correct that the play’s significance lies in its proximity to real historical events and figures; Czech resistance to Soviet occupation is not just a back-drop for Stoppard’s action. Indeed, as the playwright relates, he shaped the arguments between Jan and Ferdinand after an actual series of real debates between Vaclav Havel and his fellow Czech intellectuals (Introduction ix-xii).

But more important than his identification of historical sources, is Stoppard’s even-handedness in his introduction to the play when assessing the part that rock ‘n’ roll played in effecting the Velvet Revolution: “The Plastic People of The Universe did not bring down Communism, of course…[But w]hat could not be separated were disengagement and dissidence…The rock ‘n’ roll underground, as [impresario Ivan] Jirous said, was an attack on the official culture of Communist Czechoslovakia, and in case he didn’t get the point, the regime sent him to gaol four times during these twenty years: culture is politics” (xiv).

The interplay of reasoned political engagement and uncageable erotic energy that is indifferent to politics is captured in the counterpoint of rock music and projections of historical events and phenomena on a circular screen placed above the action upstage. There have been complaints about Michael Gianfresco’s two principal sets, one of which represents Max’s Cambridge house/garden, and the other Jan’s apartment in Czechoslovakia. Rolling these sets in from and out to the wings does, I suppose, slow the action, but the main problem is not the set, nor is it Kimberly Purtell’s lighting. The main problem is simply that the music (Todd Charlton designed the sound) is not loud enough. For rock’s uncageability to stand a chance against the reasoned debate in Max’s and Jan’s homes, the audience needs to feel the music like a punch in the face. As Eleanor says, Eros is not merely “naughty.”

Fioiona Reid as Eleanor, Belinda Cornish as Lenka, and Kenneth Welsh as Max. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

If Smyth’s silly, and rather embarrassing, writhing to this music in act one does little to suggest rock’s pagan energy, Eleanor’s point of view gains some credibility thanks to Cornish’s Lenka in act two. Lenka, who stays in Cambridge to become a classics professor and Max’s on-again-off-again lover after Eleanor dies, channels Eleanor through her belief in the mystical, in that which escapes rational thought. Cornish imbues Lenka with a plausible Central European attitude of cultural-historical-philosophical superiority (‘What do these shallow Westerners know about life?’), that covers over her assertion that “‘Make love not war’ was more important than ‘Workers of the world unite’” (97). So, too, does Cornish’s portrayal of Lenka’s calm intellectual certainty give power to her accusation against Max, “Reason is your superstition. Nature is deeper than reason, and stranger” (101).

However, Stoppard does not offer any easy triumph of rock-paganism-as-revolution, and this history play says more about the contemporary “West” than it does about the drawn-out death of Soviet socialism. Rock ‘n’ Roll has this effect because Max ‘wins’ his argument with Eleanor; like Stoppard, who was embarrassed by the English 1960s Max dismisses the era as a “highly specialized brothel” where people went about “dressed like gigantic five-year-olds at a society wedding…exchanging bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood Eastern religions” (95). More damningly, he points out to his daughter Esme’s journalist ex-husband Nigel (Donald Carrier) and Nigel’s new partner, journalist Candida (Jacklyn Francis), that their revolution was bogus because “It left the system in place…altering the psyche has no effect on the social structure. You drop out or fit in. In the end, you fitted in” (96-97). 

Max’s accusation cuts deeper than he knows because Rock ‘n’ Roll cages the supposedly uncageable spirit of its music. The play opens with Esme (Alex Paxton-Beesley in act 1, Reid plays the older Esme in act 2) encountering what she thinks is Pan, the mythic satyr associated with orgiastic sex, intense mental distraction, and music—the embodiment of rock’s uncageable spirit. The figure is most likely Syd Barret, who dropped out of Pink Floyd in 1968 and lived as a recluse in Cambridge until his death in 2006. His dissociation from the mainstream makes him the Western counterpart to the PPU, whose iconoclasm Stoppard describes by approvingly quoting Jirous: “the first [official] culture doesn’t want us, and we don’t want anything to do with the first culture. This eliminates the temptation that for everyone, even the strongest artist, is the seed of destruction: the desire for recognition, success, winning prizes and titles, and last but not least, the material security which follows” (Introduction xx).

Fiona Reid as Esme (older) and Alex Paxton-Beesley as Alice. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

Barrett the eccentric recluse, whom Esme’s daughter Alice (Paxton-Beesley) “protects,” avoids this temptation, and although he does not explicitly appear onstage, he is re-incorporated into the establishment culture by Candida. She has her paper print a current picture of Barrett and runs an unflattering assessment of him beneath (“a vegetable with the wild staring eyes of a frightened animal,” 82) all part of her sanctimonious mission to skewer the “high and mighty” (97). In the words of Alice’s boyfriend Stephen (a very good Patrick Kwok-Choon), it is only “overheated nonsense, apparently written for people with arrested development, and mindlessly cruel” (100). It is a form of cruelty, furthermore, that serves the venal interests of former ‘flower children’ who pursue material security by re-framing or caging their former iconoclast heroes.

Stoppard treats the incorporation and re-framing of Czech rock music with less ado but roughly the same effect. Back in Czechoslovakia with Esme, Jan tells her that one former PPU member is going to America: “These are new times. Who will be rich? Who will be famous?” (107). Given the chance, or simply enough time, Stoppard suggests, the desire for recognition and the material security which follows will lead the establishment to adapt itself and subsume indifference, no matter how vital or revolutionary that indifference might appear. As Lenka has her student translate from Plutarch, “Great Pan is dead” (107).

The production finally comes into its own in the play’s last few scenes. On that preview night, the actors settled into their characters for these scenes and provided much more subtle performances than they had earlier. Smyth, especially, toned down his Jan and leant the character a quiet, melancholic dignity that was far more compelling than it had been in act 1. Reid’s scatterbrained Esme was not much different from her scatterbrained Eleanor, except that she is far more appealing as the former, largely because she did not have to try to convince us of her Esme’s mental prowess (she lacks it). However, the final half hour benefitted most from the presence of Cornish’s Lenka and Paxton-Beesley, who wears the intellect inherited from her grandparents far better than Reid and Welsh could. Best of all, the actors gave the sense of having had to live through compromise, which helped them to carry off the closing scenes’ contradictory tones relatively well.

The tone of the final scene is meant to be celebratory; Esme and Jan turn upstage to cheer the Rolling Stones at the Strahov stadium in Prague as “Start Me Up” begins to play. But just what is being celebrated? Two decades have now passed since the fall of communism in Europe and there is certainly little chance that any revolution will be started under the auspices of CanStage. Is this production merely nostalgia for its audiences? The show is not perfect but I do not think its principal note is nostalgia.

Instead, it captures Jan’s admiration of England’s political, judicial, and cultural institutions. The show is an implicit recognition that while one of those institutions—the theatre—can re-frame whatever it is that Barrett’s or Pan’s or the PPU’s energies point to, it is used here and now (at most) to reflect and edify, not to rebel. Stoppard—Sir Tom—is right to assert that culture is politics and this production, quite clearly represents the politics of establishment culture. To paraphrase Max, Rock ‘n’ Roll may affect our psyches but in its run at CanStage we are still being invited to fit in.

Works Cited

Innes, Christopher. “Towards a Post-millennial Mainstream? Documents of the Times.” Modern Drama 50.3 (Fall 2007): 435-452.

Stoppard, Tom. “Introduction.” Rock ‘n’ Roll. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. ix-xx.

Stoppard, Tom. Rock ‘n’ Roll. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.