Theater News

Just as I was sitting down to write about Rock ‘n’
Roll—Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play about communists and rock bands
in Prague and London—a young playwright, a friend of mine who
heard I was at the show, sent me a text.

“Remember, Stoppard is both our friend and our enemy,” he wrote. “He
knows he can get away with this play because he’s written better
plays. And we give him a pass because we loved Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead.” The young playwright is correct (though I’m
adding Arcadia to Dead). Stoppard has even written some
dreadful plays, but Rock ‘n’ Roll isn’t dreadful. It is merely
good.

It begins in 1968: The Czech Republic is trying to reform its way
from Soviet shackles and toward freer speech, travel, and press. The
USSR freaks out, Leonid Brezhnev sends in the tanks, and young Jan
flees Cambridge and Max, his British Marxist mentor, to fight for
reform and “socialism with a human face.” In the play’s first
lines, the fusty old Max (played by a delightfully crotchety Denis
Arndt) excoriates Jan (Matthew Floyd Miller) for putting nationalism
before the revolution. “At the first flutter of a Czech flag, you cut
and run,” Max growls. “Fuck off back to Prague, then. And I’m sorry
about the tanks.”

The play ping-pongs between Cambridge and Prague, measuring the
fallout (political, professional, romantic) of 1968, with a special
emphasis on popular Stoppard themes: the intersection of intellectuals
and pop culture, and younger women who lust after older,
professorial men. (I’m not judging, Tom. Just noticing.) Rock
‘n’ Roll is a fast-moving crash course in Czech history:
Václav Havel, “the power of the powerless,” Charter 77, the
Plastic People of the Universe—a real-life band of psychedelic
rockers—and whether their rock ‘n’ roll decadence qualifies as
political dissent. “The policeman isn’t frightened by
dissidents!” Jan declares to a Czech friend. “Why should he be?
Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics.
Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith… But the Plastics
don’t care at all. They’re unbribable.“

The play doesn’t soar through the cerebral stratosphere like
Arcadia and doesn’t have the machine-gun wit of Dead, but
ACT’s quality cast gives it a rich, human glow. Anne Allgood, in
particular, delivers a soul-scorching monologue as Eleanor, a professor
of ancient Greek and Max’s cancer-stricken wife. In the middle of an
argument, Max gets carried away with his dialectical materialism.
Eleanor fires back: “I don’t want your ‘mind,’ which you can make out
of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral—I want your
grieving soul or nothing!”

She fell to the floor, and the audience applauded her in the
blackout—an actor elevating a line from mere goodness to
greatness.