THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Tom Stoppard
Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London NW3 3EU, until January 27, 2024
Which kind of revolution – bloody, physical violence that runs the risk of almost certain failure, or deeply patient, slow-burning, cultural resistance through art, music, and literature – most effectively brings about change?
This is one of the central questions at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, currently playing at the Hampstead Theatre.
And I love it.
I love that Stoppard foregrounds ideas and presents them in glorious, viscerally tense, complicated, pulsating battle with each other. This is a play bravely dripping with ideas, ideas that are happily and recklessly driven to lock horns creating a compelling saga on stage that spans decades from the midst of to the end of the Cold War and ultimately celebrates the power of music, namely rock, to subversively liberate us from the mind-forged manacles of history and the past.
Set initially in Cambridge but against the Prague Spring of 1968, the play features firebrand, ironside Marxist academic Max Morrow, played with gravity and emotional depth by Nathaniel Parker, lumbering lugubriously through the political debates of the day and standing up for the Soviets, despite their violent suppression of dissidence through the rolling of armored tanks into Prague, and his young Czech protegé, Jan, played with the subtlety of an artist and the fortitude of a marathon runner by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, perfectly capturing the naive, wide eyed, Milan Kundera-like optimism that turns through the endurance of the slings and arrows of cold war history into a wry world-weariness by the end of the two and a half hours on stage.
Panicked by the events of the Prague Spring, Jan heads home and so begins a journey for him and for Max that lasts decades and sees an utterly compelling intellectual and moral evolution for both characters, mixed with hard-hitting chords, searing riffs and the sinister surveillance of the secret police. Interlaced cleverly by director Nina Raine through all the action, intellectual debate and milestones in the lives of each of the characters are the freeing sounds of Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, and even Guns N’ Roses as the play takes us into the late ‘80s (I’m pretty sure Appetite for Destruction was '88. Go ahead. Google it if you like. I’m not going to. I grew up with Guns N’ Roses as an after school snack for the ears from around the 5th grade). The sense that there is an undercurrent of rebellious revolution brewing underneath Soviet oppression is ever present as the actors dance lithely across the scene throwing themselves elastically around in sync with the beat of each snippet of song that’s played during the scene changes.
I will not say that I agree wholeheartedly with Stoppard’s insistence that you can get on perfectly well without knowledge of the political context. My 16 year old drifted sitting next to me and complained that he wasn’t getting what everyone was so worked up about during the interval. But he soon changed his tune in the second act. Saying that, who could not be moved by Nancy Carroll’s pathos evoking portrayal of a woman battling a terminal illness and desperately trying to make intellectual husband Max feel in his heart deeper than the dry intellectual debate he articulates from his head? Nor could one be less moved seeing Carroll deftly switch to playing her daughter in the full of her health in her 40s in the second act!
There is a beautiful love story, that I will not spoil, at the heart of it all. Several in fact, arguably, amorous and platonic. Perhaps the feeling that what is liberated through rock, and by turns what is oppressed by totalitarian regimes, is one’s ability to love freely, to express oneself, to love art, to love someone like a father or to burn a candle for someone with whom you fell in love on a stolen youthful night.
As Jan asserts at the end of the first act, it’s only Rock ‘n’ Roll.
