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by Tom Stoppard, directed by Donna Feore

Canadian Stage Company/Citadel Theatre,

Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

October 1-24, 2009

Overheard while exiting Rock ’n’ Roll, a husband says to his wife, “I thought this would be more like Jersey Boys.”  No, as these confused patron discovered, despite the title Tom Stoppard’s latest play is not a glitzy musical.  Instead, it’s a lush tapestry of ideas that makes most contemporary plays look like threadbare chintz.  Canadian Stage and the Citadel Theatre have mustered a fantastic cast who give impassioned performances, but such a demanding, intellectual work needs much more incisive direction than Donna Feore provides.

The action covers the period 1968-1990 in both Cambridge, England, and in Prague, Czechoslovakia.  We follow the lives of the ardent communist Max (Kenneth Welsh), a professor expounding revolution from his safe ivory tower, and his Czech student Jan (Shaun Smyth), who returns to Prague to save his mother when he learns of the Russian occupation.  Jan is politically naive, his main passion being rock music by British, American and Czech bands, especially Pink Floyd.  The crumbling of democracy in Czechoslovakia and the radicalization of Jan parallels the deterioration due to cancer of Max’s wife Eleanor (Fiona Reid) and Max’s infidelity.  

This is as much as Feore get from the play.  What she misses is that Stoppard uses Czech history and rock music only as examples in a larger argument.  Why does Stoppard include so much discussion of Sappho’s poetry?  Why do Max and Eleanor have a major confrontation over the difference between meanings of “brain” and “mind”.  Why are there constant references to the god Pan throughout the play?  In Feore’s production this larger picture never emerges.  She never makes clear that Stoppard views both communism and capitalism as systems that can never tame nature (Pan) because nature also includes disorder, of which rock music is one form of celebration.  To make things worse, Feore imposes a deadening stop-start pace to the play through overextended transitions between the many scenes.  Just where concentration is needed, Cameron Davis’s psychedelic video projections distract.  

Nevertheless the 11-member cast is uniformly excellent.  Smyth is outstanding in charting the enormous arc of Jan’s psychological journey.  Reid is terrific as the fierce but dying Eleanor in Act 1, and in Act 2 as Eleanor’s brain-fried daughter Esme.  Welsh is forceful as the coddled curmudgeon who can’t admit he’s wrong.  Feore misses that the intellectual arguments among these four are not there for their own sake but as products of strong emotions that link them.  If she has seen this Rock ’n’ Roll would pack a punch strong enough to knock out any musical.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-06.

Photo: Patrick Kwok-Choon, Alex Paxton-Beesley, Belinda Cornish, Shaun Smyth, Donald Carrier, Jacklyn Francis, Fiona Reid and Kenneth Welsh. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.