Ruth Leon’s Pocket Theatre Review
Ruth Leon recommendsRock ‘n’ Roll – Hampstead Theatre
This sturdy revival of Tom Stoppard’s play at Hampstead, directed by Nina Raine, takes place between Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, in other words, between 1968 and 1989, in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge.
Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), Czech post-Graduate, clashes with his Cambridge tutor, Max (Nathaniel Parker) over their differing views about the mass protests and uprisings which are beginning to take hold in Czechoslovakia. Max is a lifelong Communist, his commitment to the ideology unshaken by the movement for liberalisation which he sees as entirely negative. Jan, obsessed with Western pop, collector of illegal recordings and a great admirer of the legendary Czech group The Plastic People of the Universe, sees in the music and the protests the future for his country.
But, as always with Stoppard, before you become too bogged down in the politics and the rhetoric and the long speeches about ideology, the people take over. You always want to get to know his people better and particularly here, even if your interest in Balkan politics is minor, they are all worth knowing. Not just Jan and Max, but also Max’s dying wife, Elinor, (a wonderful Nancy Carroll who in the second act takes on the role of her daughter, Esme) a classics tutor who understands the impact of history.
Every character in Rock ‘n’ Roll is written into the play for a specific reason which, if that is your bent, you can actually diagram but, why bother, when each is so individually significant and signals their place in Stoppard’s carefully worked-out pattern. And slowly his point, the central conflict becomes manifest, between communism and socialism, between youth and age, between traditional and contemporary music and therefore between traditional and contemporary values.
And because this is a history play and we know how things turned out in what became the Czech Republic, we can evaluate the value of protest and revolution and how they play out in our own time.
Again, nobody here cares about live theatre, especially this lame twee nonsense. Especially not enough to read a review… and very especially not a “pocket review”. What does that even mean.