Communism, Marxism, Trotskyism. Pink Floydism – Rock’n’Roll has the lot.

Set in two cities, spanning 22 years and three generations with nine actors playing 19 roles this is no entrée to Tom Stoppard. He’s got the big guns out, namely political discourse during the Thatcher years when Communism was rolling around Czechoslovakia. As it was so often in this time rock music plays a clever foil for protest.

The heavily politicised dialogue is punctuated by several poignant moments that lift the play from being a history lesson and reminds us that indeed Stoppard is not just a word whizz but also a fine distiller of the human condition.

The scenes between Max and Elenor about the onslaught of cancer and later when Jan and the older Esme try to farewell each other were the most affecting. Both utilise the considerable talents of actress Michele Amas.

Jeffrey Thomas who plays Max has a voice that resonates through the theatre (and the sternum) – he had some of the most difficult text to wade through and yet it seemed effortless. Finally, Aaron Alexander, who played Jan, owned the first act. Almost always onstage he convincingly juggled a Czech and neutral accent when appropriate.

This reviewer feels you could easily do without the last 15 minutes or so because at three hours in length this is a weighty piece that takes dedication to digest. If you care to dine however it is a rewarding experience.

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  (March 14-20 2009), on sale now.]

"I know where Syd Barrett lives," sang British group the Television Personalities. Tom Stoppard goes one better: he knows where the early Pink Floyd frontman was when he got the inspiration for his song Golden Hair.

In the opening scene of Rock’n’Roll, Barrett is a Pan-like piper sitting on the garden wall of Cambridge professor Max Morrow’s house, serenading his blonde daughter, Esme.

It is 1968 and the Prague Spring is unravelling in Czechoslovakia, prompting the return of young academic Jan, who has been studying under Max, a resolutely unreconstructed communist as old as the October Revolution. [Source]

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Stoppard’s engrossing play Rock ‘n’ Roll starts in a garden in Cambridge, England, in 1968 with the God Pan (or is it Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd?) playing a pipe to a flower child, while in Czechoslovakia Dubcek’s mild reforms are unsettling the Russians. The play ends, having moved back and forth between the two cities, at a Rolling Stones concert in Prague in 1990 at the start of the Velvet Revolution.

The link between the two cities is Jan, a Czech student studying Marxism in Cambridge under the guidance of Max, a curmudgeonly, unrepentant Marxist who remained a Communist party member despite Hungary.

Jan returns to Prague with his precious collection of rock ‘n’ roll records just before the Russians replace Dubcek with their man Husak. Slowly Jan becomes involved with the realities of the lack of individual freedom as Havel and others write Charter 77 and the musicians of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe upset the authorities with their long hair and their complete indifference to politics.

Jan describes the Plastics as "coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans." And the play is essentially a debate, with many of the best lines given to the ‘devil’ Max, about the nature of individual freedom, dissidence, and revolution. The Czechs’ hard fought for freedoms are contrasted with the current erosion of English liberties and what a character describes "a democracy of obedience."

Being a Stoppard play there are scenes about the poetry of Sappho, family life, and consciousness all wrapped up inside the political debate about personal and civc happiness. It’s an exhilarating play, even if the ending is a little too pat and sentimental for comfort.

It has, as a friend said at the interval, gained in topicality since it was first performed in 2006 since when Capitalism seems to be in danger of imploding in much the same way as Communism did in the 1970s.

Susan Wilson’s strong production, with its revolving stage and excellent overhead video projections (Andrew Simpson) of date and place, accompanied by bursts of rock music between scenes, serves the play well particularly in the first half. In the second half the energy stalled at times and the cast and the production in the final scenes were unable to make Stoppard’s drawn out happy endings believable.

There are some first rate performances. Aaron Alexander is impressive as the quietly independent, rock addicted Jan (Stoppard’s alter ego?). Jeffrey Thomas makes Max totally believable and the character’s occasional bursts of temper are frightening and the underplayed displays of compassion quietly affecting.

Michele Amas, who is, as usual, superb, plays two roles: Max’s cancer-ridden wife Eleanor, and Esme, Eleanor and Max’s daughter who as a girl (played by Sophie Hambleton) saw Syd Barrett (or was it Pan?) in the garden.

While it hasn’t the cohesiveness of his masterpiece Arcadia, Rock ‘n’ Roll is stuffed with enough wit, humour, compassion, debate and intellectual and emotional stimulus to make most other plays seem empty in comparison. Thoroughly recommended.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll is a complex play but, as with richly textured music, if you submit to its totality particular aspects will engage your emotions and intellect. You may feel reconnected to past personal experiences and discover things you didn’t know. You may be inspired to reflect on where we are now, first in relation to the last 40 years then to most of recorded human history, given the clever way the play reaches right back to Ancient Greece …

In essence I’d say Rock ‘n’ Roll is about revolution: social, political and that of the LP record. And occupation: of states, of minds and of the body (as in cancer). And love; of self, family, humanity – and rock ‘n’ roll. 

Conclusion? It was rock ‘n’ roll that defeated Soviet communism in Czechoslovakia. The final image evokes crowds of Czechs at Prague’s Strahov stadium in August 1990, where the Communist Party used to hold its rallies …  

The journey to that redefining moment spans 22 years, from Syd Barrett’s return home to Cambridge in 1968 after leaving Pink Floyd, and his ‘Golden Hair’ single (based on the James Joyce poem ‘Lean Out of the Window’), through references to Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, to the emergence of Czechoslovakia’s own Plastic People of the Universe.

It was the communist regime’s brutal fear-based treatment of that band and their fans, and the trial of the Plastics in 1976 for spreading anti-socialist ideas (they were convicted for "organized disturbance of the peace") that provoked playwright Vaclav Havel and other writers and academics to form the human rights movement Charter 77, 12 years before Havel became president of the Czech Republic. The Stones Prague concert came the year after that.

The way genius playwright Tom Stoppard explores all this is to focus on an academic couple in Cambridge, England, their daughter and their students, one of whom returns to Prague in the spring of 1968. That’s when the Soviets begin their repression of the liberal policies of Communist leader Alexander Dubcek, in totalitarian contradiction of the ‘flower power’ revolution that is radically changing the western world.

The couple are Marxist philosopher Max and Classical Studies professor Eleanor, who teaches Sapphic poetry. Esme, their daughter, is a "peace and happiness" flower child. The Czech student, Jan, is a loyal Communist with a growing devotion to rock ‘n’ roll. Thus the pagan sensualism of Sappho in a culture dominated by determinist Gods is compared and contrasted with the anarchism of rock ‘n’ roll under a dictatorial political regime. As I said: genius.

Over two Acts and 15 scenes, the action spanning 1968 to 1990 alternates between Cambridge and Prague bringing, among other things, three generations of women to the fore. The only things that don’t change are the wallpaper in the College-owned home, the furniture and the brick wall in the garden.

As with all Stoppard plays, Rock ‘n’ Roll is a challenge to produce and this Circa team, with director Susan Wilson at the helm, makes it their own absolutely. What’s lost from playing in a larger space with a bigger budget and backstage crew, to better manifest the difference between a fertile English garden in different seasons and a bland Prague flat, is gained in the relative intimacy of Circa One, where actors can ‘be’ their characters without having to over-project. In this we are blessed.  

The casting is impeccable. Jeffrey Thomas is superb as Max, the intractable idealist Marxist who resorts to abusive ridicule and name-calling when others dare to differ, yet loves his wife and daughter profoundly, accommodating the slings and arrows of their varying fortunes with humanity and vulnerability. Thomas never misses an emotional beat as he blends the fearsome charisma of an intellectual tyrant with the love and compassion of a husband, father and grandfather.

As his wife Eleanor, testing her students’ understanding of Sappho, Michele Amas compels our empathy with the grief, anger and momentary cruelty of a woman who has lost a breast to cancer and is confronting her mortality. Amas’s Act Two metamorphosis into the older Esme, who eschewed higher education for getting high on grass, and dwells on an hallucination (or was it?) of Syd Barrett as the great god Pan, and now feels intellectually inadequate, is equally compelling, especially when her daughter Alice proves to be as academically onto it as her grandmother Eleanor was even if her musical taste is wanting.  

Completing the family trio with equal authenticity, Sophie Hambleton fully inhabits the dual roles of Esme in her flower-child phase and Alice, first confronting the horrors of having to live in Cambridge in her gap year before she goes to Cambridge University, then in her element in academia while attempting to hold a dinner party to meet her father’s new wife.

Heading the Prague contingent is Aaron Alexander’s conflicted Jan, the realist Communist attempting to find some equilibrium between his loyalty to his home country, his love of the Cambridge lifestyle and his devotion to rock ‘n’ roll, not to mention Esme … He hits all his marks in jousting with Max, communing with Esme, coping with interrogation and arguing socialist dialects with his friend Ferdinand: an anti-repression activist, very well played by Richard Knowles.

Gavin Rutherford is unnerving as the Interrogator, even more so as clandestine party operative Milan, and is blandly British as journalist Nigel, the non-custodial father of Alice.

Laura Hill brings a subtle versatility to her four well realised roles: the timid student Gillian, Jan’s would-be girlfriend Magda, cult columnist Candida (Nigel’s new wife), and fresh young Classics student Deirdre, who waxes with joyous innocence in quoting Plutarch: "tell them that great Pan is dead!"

Deirdre’s professor is Lenka, who came to Cambridge with Jan and stayed to complete her Classical Studies and join the faculty. Tina Regtien maps her maturation over the decades beautifully, from committed sensualist to politically disillusioned helpmate of Max.

The final quartet of roles are accomplished with skill by James Conway-Law as the Piper (Syd Barrett?); a fresh-faced yet loathsome Czech policeman; Alice’s "official shag" Stephen, presumably a Political Science student in 1990 (whose robust debate with Max summarises how the Left has dissipated over the Thatcher years); and Jaroslav, a waiter in Prague who joins Jan, Esme and Ferdinand at the Stones concert.

Pan is dead: long live Pan? The more things change the more they stay the same? The end of the play is just the beginning? There is plenty to ponder and talk about when it’s over.

John Hogkins adds to the revolutionary theme with a revolving stage set the keeps the action moving. Andrew Simpson’s above-stage video images add evocative touches to the time and place labels. Jennifer Lal’s operating of Phillip Dexter’s lighting design and Thomas Press’s sound compilation meets all the demands of Stoppard’s "smash cut" stage directions. Gillie Coxill’s costume designs are exactly right and happily don’t draw undue attention to themselves.

You won’t see a play this rich on telly. Stoppard is a truly exceptional playwright and this is a rare opportunity to see his excellence brought to stimulating life. Don’t miss it.   

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