Miranda Colchester & Rufus Sewell
in Rock 'n' Roll
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Those awaiting a reteaming of one of the most galvanic stage pairings of the 1990s can start exulting right now: Rufus Sewell, the fine-boned actor who burst to the forefront of the British theatre as the original Septimus in
Arcadia in 1993, has reteamed with the playwright Tom Stoppard to equally electrifying effect. As Jan, a somewhat reluctant Czech dissident whose life is intricately bound up with the popular music of the period, Sewell gives galloping force to Stoppard's latest play,
Rock 'n' Roll, in a performance likely to have the same effect on audiences that the Rolling Stones, amongst many others, have on the various characters in Stoppard's long, sometimes clunky but, in the end, emotionally liberating play. One's last image of Sewell is of a man in full, unself-conscious thrall both to a woman (Sinead Cusack's onetime flower-child, Esme) and to a sound that between them transcend politics—just as
Rock 'n' Roll, for all its debates on such topics as Marxist dogma, does as well.
Sewell plays an academic caught between two cultures, who is first glimpsed in Cambridge bidding farewell to his mentor of sorts, Max Morrow (Brian Cox), an unrepentant Communist who prides himself on being precisely the same age as the October Revolution of 1917. As the play opens, it's 1968, and Jan is returning to his native Prague, taking nothing with him but—a telling detail—his records. On his way home, in his words, "to save Socialism," Jan is easily read as an imagined version of Stoppard himself—or, more accurately, the Stoppard that might have been if his family hadn't fled Czechoslovakia at the outset of World War II, the dramatist now even more firmly entrenched an Englishman than the Anglomaniacal Jan in this play. (One crucial difference is that Stoppard, interestingly, doesn't speak Czech, whereas Jan, of course, does.) An early exchange in the play about Jan's somewhat cautious Jewishness ("so it seemed," he notes, deadpan, in response to a question as to whether he was Jewish) tallies intriguingly with Stoppard's own remarks on the topic, the playwright raising well into his career issues of religious identification much as Mike Leigh also did last year in his latest play, Two Thousand Years.
Politics, though, remain this play's abiding concern, which is to say systems that encompass people who will not always be claimed by them. And yet, the call to arms, whatever the specific "ism" involved, can't easily compete with the siren song of Pan, the piper heard at the start of the play. A pagan force, his presence inhabits the subversive music of the psychedelic Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose actual fate becomes enmeshed with that of the fictional Jan, who ends up in prison courtesy the same country of which the armchair Communist, Max, can claim to be "looking east to the source" for some better way. In a classic case of Stoppardian contradiction, Jan admires the British for the very moderation and relativism that exasperates Max, for whom his country's working class long ago gave up on being agents of change when they could instead be willing slaves to the tabloid press.
Arcadia moved effortlessly between centuries in a National Theatre debut staging from Trevor Nunn that was famously light on its feet. (The subsequent Lincoln Center transfer, though good enough, wasn't quite so fleet.) Here, swapping not between centuries but locations, from Cambridge to Prague and back again across 22 years, Nunn's staging gives off a disconcerting sense early on of the lecture hall—albeit on topics not usually studied at Cambridge, which is to say the provenance of the various songs from Dylan, the Stones, Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground that punctuate the scene changes: more information than you ever wanted to know gets projected before us until the lights go up on another view of Robert Jones' not terribly interesting skeletal turntable of a set.
Sinead Cusack & Brian Cox
in Rock 'n' Roll
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In the first act, too, we seem to be listening to a lot of position papers, however fervently Cox, returning to a regular home at the Royal Court, puts them forth. Against his intellectual entrenchment, Cusack cuts to the affective quick playing a wife, Eleanor, so ravaged by cancer that it's amazing her character can still conduct tutorials, even from a garden table. But there she sits, decoding alongside her students the writings of Sappho and deriding the pronouncements on consciousness profferred by her husband. Cusack, a great actress absolutely tailor-made for Stoppard, returns in act two as her first-act character's now grown-up daughter, Esme, a casting gambit that requires a somewhat dubious wig to carry off, though it's worth it for the shining empathy brought by Cusack to the closing scenes.
On the wig front, Sewell's changing hair length constitutes an ancillary play all its own, and the actor is never less than wonderful, whether adopting the Byronic stature recalled from Arcadia or tapping into a quiet sweetness I've never clocked in him before. Cunningly, the actor adopts a gentle, entirely convincing Czech accent in conversation with the English characters in the play, reverting to his own English accent when talking to those characters who are themselves Czech (one of whom, Peter Sullivan's Ferdinand, turns the topic of hair into a visual punchline). It's rending in the context of this play to hear of Jan's records having been smashed by the authorities in 1976—doubly so on a night when Mick Jagger and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour (not to mention Vaclav Havel) were in the Court audience. But as the second act continues, Rock 'n' Roll raises its own accelerating beat all the way to a giddy finale in which the British theatre's most celebrated wordsmith, and not for the first time, lands an audience in the joyous realm beyond language.
Rock 'n' Roll
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs