Theater Review: "Rock 'n' Roll," by Tom Stoppard

Reviewing Rock 'n' Roll—which just closed this past weekend at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in New York—The New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote, "Anyone who still believes Mr. Stoppard is a strictly cerebral dramatist need only check out this rich consideration of love, revolution and loud music."

Well, not quite. After The Real Thing, Sir Tom Stoppard really doesn't have to prove his credentials as an artist of heart and soul anymore than Stephen Sondheim should.

Nor is being "cerebral" or "intellectual" a problem. The issue is whether the playwright finds a seamless form to match the play's vaunting ambition –or, at least, to propel it forward with irresistible energy.

A Theatrical Stew Filled With Art, Love, Words…and Revolution

My verdict is mixed. With Rock 'n' Roll, Stoppard has created a flawed but often stirring reconsideration of his usual obsessions: art, love and the power of words, for good or evil.

Stoppard is from the George Bernard Shaw school of playwrighting: tackle any subject, whip it into a thematic stew more likely to leave a tangy taste than to be digested fully, and stage the proceedings for however long he thinks fit, hoping that intelligence and provocative wit will carry all before it.

Fortunately, he has been blessed with a British cast who leapt at the chance to give life to his often long, complex speeches – Brian Cox as Marxist professor Max Morrow; Rufus Sewall as Jan, the Czech exchange student and rock ‘n’ roll aficionado, caught up in his country’s aborted “Prague Spring” before the Soviet tanks rolled; Stephen Kunkel as Jan’s friend Ferdinand; and several actors in multiple roles, most notably Sinead Cusack as Max’s wife Eleanor and an older version of his daughter Esme.

And, in Trevor Nunn, he has a director ready to try any bit of stagecraft to prevent Stoppard’s talky tendency from slowing the pace: multimedia displays, revolving sets that whisk the audience between locales (England and Czechoslovakia) and times (from 1967 to the fall of Communism), and a soundtrack that’s positively rapturous for a baby boomer (though flashing the title of songs, their performers, songwriters and recording dates might be a tad too much information).

First, my difficulties with the play:

1) Too much British lingo for an American audience (will someone please tell me what an "FHB" is?)
2) Some plot elements are so badly integrated with the rest that they should have been cut as tangential (e.g., the material on Syd Barrett, the Pink Floyd founder who ended his days as a balding, mentally ill recluse and object of local curiosity in Cambridge);
3) You can't simply glance at the liner notes—you need to know every single line of it, and beforehand (I kept wondering about "Yugo"—why so many references to a foreign car?—until, at intermission, I noticed from the program that "Hugo" was the manager of the Plastic People of the Universe, the Czech rock 'n' roll group that became lionized by the dissident movement despite themselves).

The Body vs. The Spirit

Nevertheless, I'm glad that this play has attracted so much attention. I hope it will gain even more—perhaps, as unlikely as it may seem, in a film adaptation—for the light it sheds on the enormous state apparatus and shamefully silent intelligentsia required to sustain a totalitarian state. (Though the German film The Lives of Others is nowhere near Stoppard's equal in its intellectual firepower, it is far more dramatic and involving.)

My friend Linnea has read or seen eight--count 'em, nine--Stoppard plays. That achievement leaves me in awe. My exposure to the British playwright is nowhere near as extensive, and in much more diluted form, through his screenplays for The Russia House and Shakespeare in Love (which netted him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, shared with co-scenarist Marc Norman) and in reading The Real Thing. Rock 'n' Roll was my first real exposure to Stoppard writing directly for the stage.

To be sure, some of the same instinct that fed the popularity of James Michener might also be behind Stoppard's cachet: the desire to feel educated and to learn new things (such as, in this play, the love poetry of Sappho). But surely Michener seldom if ever displayed Stoppard’s coruscating wit.

What particularly fascinates me about the play, however, is its engagement with matters spiritual.

Now, talking about spirituality is a sure way of emptying out a party among Britain's "chattering classes," not to mention New York's Upper West Side or entire floors of The New York Times building in midtown Manhattan.

I should also mention right away, before I hear voices protesting at my temerity, that Stoppard professes no particular faith. When he has expressed himself on the subject, his views are highly provisional, as when one of his characters admits in the early play Jumpers, “I don't claim to know that God exists ... And yet I tell you that, now and again... I know.”

Despite—perhaps because of—this tentativeness, Stoppard in Rock ‘n’ Roll goes where theatrical angels fear to tread: the mind-body dualism, or the possibility of a soul distinct from biological impulses.

You don't have to be a diehard Marxist like Max Morrow, the Cambridge professor of politics played down to every wiggle of intellectual self-deception by the marvelous Brian Cox, to discount the possibility of a soul—science is doing an increasingly good job of it. But in the play, Max's wife Eleanor, fighting a losing battle against cancer, lashes out at this notion of a mind that, to use her husband's formulation, might as well be a beer can: ''I am not my body,'' she cries out. ''My body is nothing without me.''

But, as I maintained in an earlier post, Roman Catholicism saw far earlier than rock 'n' roll or almost any intellectual movement that dialectical materialism in general and Communism in particular was a reductionist philosophy that mentally impoverished those under its sway.

And unlike free-market true believers, who loved to trumpet their notion of the "creative destruction" of capitalism, prelates and pontiffs, from Leo XIII to John Paul II, have labeled untrammeled capitalism for what it really is—destruction, period, without the creativity.

The "radio priest" Fr. Charles Coughlin brought shame to the American Catholic Church in the 1930s with anti-Semitic diatribes, but in the same years Fr. John Ryan—nicknamed "The Right Reverend New Dealer"—was providing intellectual ballast for an alternative to Communism, Fascism and rogue capitalism with a notion of a "living wage." Yet Ryan was only one figure putting out theological markers between Pope Leo's groundbreaking 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and John Paul's unrelenting support for Solidarity.

Since the crumbling of the Iron Curtain, it’s become fashionable to state that today’s ideological struggles have lost the clarity of the old East-West struggle of the Cold War. But in those years, there were all too many people too timid to acknowledge these retrospective clear-cut differences. Even in a different time, with a different enemy, those people continue to hold sway.

At the Rock ‘n’ Roll performance I attended, at the December 30 matinee, only one audience member clapped for a ringing defense of Western values: "We apologize for what makes us great. We apologize for democracy….We apologize for our differences."

The resounding silence in the theater made me wonder if there isn't space anymore between rightwing nuts who countenance waterboarding and taunts about Barack "Hussein" Obama, and leftists so in love with multiculturalism that they won't condemn the Islamofascists who call for its extinction. (Herewith, the obligatory caveat that I’m talking about fundamentalists making Islam the sole religion of Mideast nations, rather than millions who have no quarrel with other faiths.)

Music to Save Your Mortal Soul

Back to Stoppard and his obsessions, starting with music. His passion for pop, especially rock 'n' roll, has been apparent for awhile. (If someone ever gets around to adapting The Real Thing to the big screen, Stoppard has already virtually mapped out the soundtrack, starting with the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," which his protagonist Henry famously calls “possibly the most haunting, the most deeply moving noise ever produced by the human spirit”)

This time around, Stoppard locates the opposition to dialectical materialism in the saving power of rock 'n' roll ("Can music save your mortal soul?" sings Don McLean in "American Pie.") And it is true that in the case of Vaclav Havel and other Czech dissidents, rock 'n' roll was part of their fighting faith and samizdat.

Disdaining not just for rock ‘n’ roll but also the Sixties, Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Max Morrow would be horrified to think how much he sounds like American cultural warriors who decry a decade of rebellion and the music that served as its underpinning.

I confess to feeling a bit queasy myself over the baby boomer in the play’s dinner scene who cries triumphantly, “But we changed the world!” Couldn’t Stoppard have sounded a bit less self-congratulatory by acknowledging how the Dionysian energies of this generation and their music destroyed at the same time it liberated so many from social constraints?

Ravaging Time and Inconvenient Truth-Tellers

Much of what I found haunting about the play—undoubtedly owing to my own struggles in middle age—derives from Stoppard’s elegiac treatment of what he called in Vanity Fair “mutability and the governance of time.”

Hardly any of Stoppard’s characters here emerges unscathed from this process—not cancer-stricken Eleanor; not Max’s beloved Jan, bent and aged by more than a decade of work in a bakery for his political activity; not even Max, who, for all his inability to give up on his Marxist dreams, is left at the end with the recognition that his whole career rested on belief in a lie.

The natural initial wish—my own, certainly—is that someone other than the superficial journalist Nigel (say, the sweetly heroic Jan) might have delivered the all-too-accurate summary of the Cambridge don’s misplaced hopes and career. But Stoppard is not only refusing to make things easy for his audience, but even recognizing a fundamental fact of human nature and living in a politically fractious environment: none of us is perfect, and even the worst of us is sometimes graced with the insight to blurt out “an inconvenient truth.”

(It is, indeed, Nigel and his journalist-colleagues who so often make it inconvenient to accept the truth. In dealing with Jan as a source in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia, Nigel continually looks for an “angle” involving dissidents, even where none may exist. And Nigel’s second wife is roundly denounced in the dinner scene for exploiting Syd Barrett’s physical decrepitude and mental collapse for her tabloid paper.)

Stoppard's play ends with the Rolling Stones' August 1990 Prague concert, staged here with the same musical exultation that greeted Leonard Bernstein in Berlin the prior year. For me, though, the idea of The Stones as the battering ram of rebellion is a bit rich.

Mick Jagger may have pumped his fists 40 years ago about being a "Street Fighting Man" and more recently issued the ironically titled "Sweet Neocon." But he and his bandmates have made their peace with Mammon as surely as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—in the early 1970s, their Exile on Main Street was recorded in France when they were tax exiles from Great Britain. Since then, they have created and fed “Rolling Stones Inc.” by cutting sponsorship and rights deals with the likes of Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft, and Sprint.

I’ve been told that Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia caused a run on bookstores and libraries by theatergoers looking to read up on works alluded to on stage or in the liner notes. I have my issues with Rock ‘n’ Roll, but any play that makes you desire a total immersion in its intellectual and cultural milieu has much to recommend it.