That’s the best scene in the play.
But emotional heat isn’t typical of Mr. Stoppard’s drama; there are no more invigorating speeches to equal the one’s I’ve quoted. To say at this stage of his game—he’s just turned 70—that Mr. Stoppard has a tendency to over-intellectualize is to state the obvious. Since his last outing with the nine-hour Russian revolutionary epic The Coast of Utopia, his curiosity is fast becoming a case of another reading list, another play.
I’m guessing that the massive three-volume history of the rise of capitalism by the unrepentant British Stalinist, Professor Eric Hobsbawm, is on Mr. Stoppard’s sagging bookshelves; the poetry of Sappho is there certainly; a well-thumbed Greek-English dictionary; possibly the behaviorist theories of B.F. Skinner; various tomes on logical empiricism; Lenin’s What Is to Be Done; and a learned history of rock ’n’ roll.
The projected credits describing the music that’s played between many of the scenes in the play is a serious problem with Trevor Nunn’s three-hour production—the action stops dead each time. Mr. Stoppard’s musical choices are great and evocatively span the era of the play (among them, the Stones, Dylan, the Doors, the Beach Boys, the Plastic People, and the Pink Floyd of the mad, dropout genius Syd Barrett, an offstage character during the action). But the solemn annotation of well-known songs, including dates and names of recording studios, makes us feel as if we’re on a pseudo-scholarly tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
When, for example, the Rolling Stones’ “It’s All Over Now” is played, we’re informed ponderously that it’s Mick Jagger (of the Rolling Stones) who’s performing it (along with someone else named Keith Richards, etc.). The entire audience wants to shout back: “WE KNOW!” But nobody does; nobody dares.
This peculiar blunder is symptom of the dry theorizing that dominates the first act. Only Mr. Stoppard would tell the story of a marriage primarily through a debate about unreconstructed Communism and the empty illusions of Marxist rhetoric. Mr. Stoppard’s wit is apparent, but his characters have become mouthpieces. What do we really know about any of them—except for their ideas?
They don’t rock; they discuss, and they discuss the familiar. Their erudite references make labored metaphors—Sappho’s Aphrodite for the uncontrollable free spirit; Eleanor’s cancer for Max’s unstoppable ideology; rock ’n’ roll and the Plastic People for Jan’s somewhat trivialized desire for freedom from persecution, and the commercialization of rock for socialism’s demise.
Which is why I enjoyed the much looser second act, with its switch in tone to a domestic comedy of manners (with fewer pretensions), and the delightful, sentimental happy ending. It looks to me like the dining room scene is a rewrite of the third act of The Seagull. (Mr. Stoppard adapted Chekhov’s play in 1997.) With his exasperated cry “What is to be done?”, Max the bewildered Leninist lumbers about the place on crutches. “Don’t be deceived,” he greets a visitor, “it’s my mind that’s gone.” He’s become Chekhov’s affectionate old duffer Sorin, who’s lost the plot.
Tom Stoppard’s acute sense of us persevering through generations owes a happy debt to Chekhov. And, since the glorious Arcadia, he’s been a specialist in the mystery and coincidence of time passing—here caught marvelously at the finish of Rock ’n’ Roll in the blinding flash of thousands of cameras and the romantic exuberance of a rock concert in newly free Prague.
