Review: Stoppard's 'Rock 'n' Roll,' on stage at ACT, is a tale of idealism found and lost

Theater review |

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo," wrote the great Czech novelist Milan Kundera.

"Rock 'n' Roll," Tom Stoppard's virtuoso drama of mid-20th-century idealism found and lost, chronicles the metaphysical vertigo experienced by a small circle of enmeshed Brits and Czechs.

In Kurt Beattie's luminous staging of this challenging, rewarding elegy for the political/cultural tumult of the 1960s, Matthew Floyd Miller shines as Jan, a rock-music-loving Czech.

As the play opens in 1968, Jan is a philosophy grad student at Cambridge University under the tutelage of Dennis Arndt's perfectly crusty, die-hard Marxist prof, Max.

Given Stoppard's brilliant knack for airing every side of a complex argument, "Rock 'n' Roll" is packed with fractious, detailed debates on Communist revolution vs. cultural evolution — as well as the feminist meanings of Sappho's ancient verses. (Max's ailing wife, Eleanor, played with fire and poignancy by Anne Allgood, is an expert on the latter.)

But like such earlier Stoppard triumphs as "Arcadia" and "The Coast of Utopia," this work is also imbued with a mature, empathetic humanism. While the intellectual discourse can get convoluted, the play also meditates movingly on aging, loss and love.

Jan's saga is especially gripping. Returning to Prague from England, as the U.S.S.R. was squelching the reformist regime of premier Alexander Dubcek, Jan places his hope for Czechoslovakia's liberation in countercultural mavericks like The Plastic People of the Universe — a hippie, hedonist, apolitical Czech rock band.

Jan's naive optimism is later punished with police raids, jail time, state-inflicted poverty (which the Plastic People also suffered).

Battered and bereft, in the late 1980s Jan finally shakes off inertia to join forces with his activist friend Ferdinand (Peter Crook) to support the "velvet revolution" that released Czechoslovakia from the Soviets' iron grip.

Jan is in part a what-if projection of Stoppard, also a Czech Jew. But it's the British-raised and rooted author's keen, witty insights into British mores, politics and music that enliven the London scenes that track Max's political and personal odyssey, and the saga of his daughter Esme (Allgood).

The strong cast (also including Andrew De Rycke and Alexandra Tavares, among others), and Matthew Smucker's savvy set make Beattie's brisk, in-the-round staging feel organic.

Instead of the cumbersome slide projections in the Broadway staging of "Rock 'n' Roll," ACT uses chalk, paper and spray paint to indicate the passing years. And Stoppard's specified sound clips of '60s rock (by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Pink Floyd, et al.) are smoothly inserted.

It would take a doctoral thesis to plumb the play's shifting political perspectives, its obsession with Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, its hard-won, joyful ending in the face of crushed utopian dreams.

But the essence can be summed up in this quote from Czech writer-activist-politician Vaclav Havel: "The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com