ROCK 'N ROLL Reviews

Talkin Broadway is Mixed-to-Positive:

"This combination of one of our most erudite playwrights with the most invigorating bands of the last four decades of the 20th century keeps Stoppard’s latest play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, up and pounding when it seems like it would rather lie down for a nap. The Royal Court Theatre London production, which just opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs under Trevor Nunn’s direction, is a swiveling circle forever in danger of becoming square, but always stopping just short of utter angularity.

This is both a disappointment and a relief. Last season’s monumental Stoppard outing, The Coast of Utopia, instead had all the kinetic energy of a buzz saw spinning off its axis, which Rock ‘n’ Roll at its best does not. But in examining subjects very similar to Utopia’s from a vantage point much closer to our own - and being strewn with those jolting tunes between scenes - this play might prove more accessible to many than that one did. (Its running time of three hours, as opposed to nine, can’t hurt either.)
_________________________________________________________________

But what is missing is a more exact mining of the revolutionary spirit. The Coast of Utopia thrilled because the roiling sextet at its core were themselves the ones shaking up Russia and Europe in the 1800s, which gave the aftershocks in their wake a power and poignancy usually lacking here. With only a few glancing exceptions, those we follow in Rock ‘n’ Roll are not on the frontlines - like most everyone else, they're stumbling through the aftermath, trying to make sense of what's happening around them.

The real story belongs to The Plastic People and the popular revolt they led, and to Václav Havel, the Czech dissident and president who was crucial in eradicating Communism and forming the Czech Republic near the start of the 1990s. Their lives and actions occasionally collide with those of Jan, Max, and those surrounding them, and Rock ‘n’ Roll is never better than at those intersections. The rest of the time, the strong fascination it exerts emanates more from those on the periphery working to create a contemporary Utopia than from those who are waiting for others to complete the project."


http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/RockRoll.html

---

Variety is Mixed:

"Would that the intellectually overburdened play's journey -- or those of its mostly unengaging characters -- had half the humanity packed into Sewell's wonderful performance. "Rock 'n' Roll" commands admiration simply by virtue of being unafraid to make demands on its audience, and it has an affecting central figure in Jan. But in order to get to 90 minutes of reasonably satisfying emotional drama, it first force-feeds you another 90 minutes of stodgy political-science backgrounding, made more cumbersome by awkward cross-cutting between Cambridge and Prague. (The latter aspect is not helped by Robert Jones' clunky set, with its pedestrian use of a central turntable.)

Jan is introduced in 1968 as a young political scholar compelled by the Soviet invasion to return to his native Prague. His irascible British professor, Max (Brian Cox), is a diehard Marxist who dismisses Jan's support for Communist reformer Alexander Dubcek as misguided. Both Max's belief in a collective socialist system and Jan's in individual freedom are steadily eroded by disillusionment as the play follows its lumpy progression.

There's some overlap here with Stoppard's last work, "The Coast of Utopia," a nine-hour trilogy both more sprawling and more fluid that also concerned the failure of idealism. But "Rock 'n' Roll" is less melancholy; it considers the way we think, feel, grieve and believe, using music as the central, overstretching metaphor for revolution, protest, liberation and emotional survival."


http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117935305.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

---

The New York Times is a Rave:

"Get out your handkerchiefs, if you please, for “Rock ’n’ Roll,” the triumphantly sentimental new play by Tom Stoppard.

Wait a minute. That sentence does not compute. The words “Tom Stoppard” and “sentimental” in intimate proximity? Mr. Stoppard is the intellectual magician who turns academic pursuits like philology, etymology and ontology into quicksilver theater. People don’t cry at his plays; they ponder.

Yet anyone who looked hard enough could always see the fragile, hopeful heart beneath the cerebral glitter in Mr. Stoppard’s work during the past 40 years, from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1967) to “The Coast of Utopia” (produced on Broadway last year). Now, for theatergoers who find looking hard to be a strain, there is “Rock ’n’ Roll,” which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater under the direction of Trevor Nunn. This is a play in which the heart of the matter is the human heart..."

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/theater/reviews/05rock.html?8dpc

---

The New York Sun is Positive:

"Last year, Tom Stoppard spent nine hours depicting the fertile minds that would plant the seeds for the Communist Revolution in "The Coast of Utopia." Now, with "Rock 'n' Roll," Mr. Stoppard has jumped forward almost exactly 100 years to taste the poisoned fruit that stemmed from this revolution. Substituting Dylan and Jagger for Bakunin and Turgenev, he completes this latest task in a third of the time and with nearly triple the impact.

...

As with "The Real Thing," another emotionally gripping Stoppard play with a deep-rooted affection for popular music, the female characters gradually creep into the foreground only to command attention with sudden force. The astonishingly good Ms. Cusack delivers one of the single most powerful sequences in all of Stoppard, a ferocious demand that Max not reduce Eleanor and her cancer-ridden body to one of his dialectic constructs."

NY Daily News is Positive:

"...Stoppard's premise is that the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, if not elsewhere, can be directly traced to the pagan, unbridled spirit of rock 'n' roll.

He builds the story around Max (Brian Cox), a Cambridge University professor with unfailing faith in communism, and his protege, Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Czech student and rock fan who returns to Prague in 1968 when the Soviet tanks roll in. The story traces the next two decades, until the occupation ends.

That alone could fill a play. But Stoppard also threads in themes about family life, cancer, Sapphic literature, sex, consciousness-raising and more. At nearly three hours long, it's too sprawling and ambitious to be consistently involving. In the end, "Rock 'n' Roll" has a good beat, but you can't always dance to it..."

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/culture/2007/11/05/2007-11-05_stoppards_latest_play_is_a_drama_of_rock.html

---

Updated On: 11/5/07 at 08:32 AM

The Washington Post is Positive:

" A word of advice to anyone dipping a toe into the exhilarating whirlpool of Tom Stoppard's remarkable new "Rock 'n' Roll": Don't worry if the first act feels at times as if you've signed up for swimming lessons and begun in water over your head.

Your close attention and forbearance will be more than amply rewarded -- and your comprehension correspondingly enriched -- after you've returned for Act 2 in the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, where this impassioned contemplation of rock, revolution and the end of communism opened last night.

The playwright does take his own sweet time laying down the rhetorical and emotional underpinnings of this three-hour drama, set over a span of 22 years in the boisterous salon of a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist don in Cambridge and the cluttered Prague flat of a Rolling Stones-worshiping Czech intellectual.

Stoppard's buoyant imagination is invigorated here by tributaries of ideas about politics and art that flow into rivers of wisdom about the nature of revolution and the human craving for free expression. It is principally, however, through the moving struggle of one person, the Czech academic -- played with endearing reserve by the captivating Rufus Sewell -- that the dramatist gives "Rock 'n' Roll" its fiercely beating heart."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/04/AR2007110401621.html

---

Newsday is Mixed-to-Positive:

"At its heady living-history best, "Rock 'n' Roll" is a direct and worthy descendent of "The Coast of Utopia," the nine-hour epic about pre-revolutionary Russian idealism, which won a record (for a play) seven Tony Awards last season. And in the deepest moments, the new play touches the pop-music nerve pathways of "The Real Thing," Stoppard's 1982 masterwork about a disintegrating marriage.

Yet for a work described as Stoppard's most personal, "Rock 'n' Roll" feels strangely distant - as if, this time, his wit and ever-dazzling erudition actually are being used to throw us off the track more than they tempt us to follow him. We do, of course, because lesser Stoppard still is better than most plays written in the past 50 years. But the thrill is more like work this time.

This may be the problem of Trevor Nunn's celebrated production, which opened last night at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre with most of the London cast. With "Coast of Utopia," American director Jack O'Brien found the great warmth, immediacy and coherence that Nunn's original staging lacked.

---