Rock ’n’ Roll, Hampstead theatre, review: A lusty, messy and exuberant revival
News broke this week that Tom Stoppard, now 86, is working on another new play. Let’s hope it holds his trademark cerebral wizardry and underused capacity for illuminating the human heart in the same perfect harmony as this minor masterpiece from 2005, in which the competing post-war idealisms convulsing Soviet-era Europe play off against the utopian dreams of the 1960s counter culture.
It’s a play that pits the machinery of repression against the siren call of optimism, but which finds the most resounding manifestation of its own ideas in the electric physicality of rock and roll. One would never accuse Stoppard of being a hippy, but there is something about this play – getting its first major London revival from director Nina Raine – that argues for the life-affirming music of the human soul over any intellectual orthodoxy.
We’re in Cambridge, 1968, and student Jan, an easygoing socialist and rock fanatic, is rushing back to his native Czechoslovakia to save it – and his mother – from the Soviet tanks that have just rolled into Prague.
His Cambridge mentor, Max, a dyed in the wool Marxist, is furious, and heartbroken at what he sees in Jan as a personal betrayal.
Come the end of the play – and for Jan one police raid, prison sentence and bucket full of political disillusionment later – we are back in England, in 1990, the Prague Spring of 1968 having somewhat belatedly found a decidedly capitalist apotheosis in the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The final scene is a love scene, yet on one level it is also an elegy for the dreams of a lost generation.
Stoppard clashes together multiple ideas in this lusty, messy, exuberant play, allowing almost every character to hang themselves on the ropes of their moral confusion while largely withholding judgement.
Jan (played with a winning quiet charisma by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) has no particular political ideology beyond a naive faith in the power of indifference, as epitomised by the apolitical hedonism of his favourite band The Plastic People of The Universe, who embody for him the essence of liberty and individual freedom.
Max (a rock solid Nathaniel Parker) worships at the alter of Marxism not only out of pig-headed defiance of the numerous people who tell him he is wrong, but because he can see that individual liberty as characterised by Jan, invariably works for the few and not the many.
Raine, directing with clarity and verve, allows the play to roll through the years quite naturally, with bursts of music – Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, U2, the play’s residing spirit Syd Barrett – accompanying each leisurely scene change.
Stoppard’s dialogue can be a challenge – everyone in his plays tend to speak as though they’ve swallowed a masters degree, not least since almost every character seems to have studied at Cambridge – but a very fine cast matches the unapologetic erudition with an easy conversational naturalism.
Nancy Carroll gives particular good value as Max’s cancer-ridden classicist wife Eleanor, threatening a student unwisely making eyes at Max with something unmentionable.
Rock n Roll contains, too, an eerily prescient note, the intimation that tanks and totalitarianism come in many forms. As Max’s teenage daughter Esme puts it: “We have to discover our human mystery for the age of technology.”
Until Jan 27. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com
