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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Rock 'n' Roll—Discs 'n' Dissidents
By Harry Haun
05 Nov 2007
When the curtain rose Nov. 4 at the Jacobs Theatre on the new Tom Stoppard play — a three-hour ideological jig he deemed to dub Rock 'n' Roll — you could almost hear a heady little horse-laugh from the author in the wings. The image that greets the audience is that of the first rocker, the great god Pan, sprawled out on a garden wall playing his flute for a susceptible blonde damsel below. How's that for getting to the roots of rock 'n' roll!
"I can't remember what I was thinking when I came up with that," Sir Tom confessed at the after-party at Angus McIndoe's, keeping his secrets. If you are to believe this blonde flower-child, Esme (played as a teenager by Alice Eve in Act I and as a grown woman by Sinead Cusack in Act II), this hallucinatory Pan she thinks she sees is her Cambridge neighbor, Syd Barrett, the Pink Floyd founder who dropped out of the fast-track rock life and became a country recluse. He's a haunting figure that hovers over this epic drama.
Essentially, Stoppard is melding revolutions here — both musical and political —showing how "socially negative music" provided the soundtrack for social change in the 1960s.
The play is a slow pan, if you will, of 22 years in 15 scenes, punctuated by blasts of pop - group rock 'n' roll for transitions, zigzagging between Cambridge and Prague (both home turfs for the playwright), from the spring of 1968 when a reform movement aimed at creating "socialism with a human face" in Prague was crushed by Soviet tanks to 1990 when the Communist party falls in the Soviet Union. The focus is on the disparate fates of two men — Esme's father, Max (Brian Cox), who preaches the joys of Communism at Cambridge, and his Czech protege, Jan (Rufus Sewell), who ill-advisedly returns home.
Max was born under a Red star — in October 1917, the very month of the Bolshevik revolution — and that was, of course, the event that Stoppard was foreshadowing in his nine-hour, three-play juggernaut of last season, The Coast of Utopia. Is Rock 'n' Roll the inevitable sequel? "I didn't think of it like that," he confessed, turning the notion over slowly in his head, "but, looking at it now, I guess you could say 'Yeah.'"
No stranger to epic scale (albeit, to a different type of tune: Cats, Les Misérables, Oklahoma!), director Trevor Nunn pumps up the volume of intellectual bombasts to rock regulation, and the political rants keep flying like ideological thunderbolts. There was, he allowed, some fine-tuning for this country. "Not a great deal," he said. "There were some small changes, but, really, I think anybody who had seen it in England and watched it again tonight would be very hard-put to tell you what the changes were.
"The special problems that America presented was that the story of Czechoslovakia and, particularly the revolution, played bigger in England than it did here because it's that much closer and that much more immediate — that much more sort of a European story.
"There's a large number of people in England who roughly know about it, and it's not so well-known here, so we had to be very, very careful about our clarity. The play does discuss Communism as a system, both its merits and demerits, and that's quite hard to do in America because of the McCarthy history and the Reagan judgment. That plays strongly here, almost to the point where it's hard to separate the theories from those judgments."
Sewell, who was born at the time the play begins, raked in all manner of awards for his moving portrayal of the doused firebrand (the Evening Standard, Critics' Circle and Olivier awards) and is well-positioned for a new harvest over here.
It must feel comforting to return to Broadway — for the first time since his debut here in Translations 12 years ago — in a proven winner, "but then you don't really spend too much time feeling wonderful," he noted. "It becomes a matter of trying to maintain what you were doing over there. It has been an extraordinary experience, the whole thing. The great thing is to be able to do it again in a different country."
He plays the part on dual speeds, separated by an intermission. He has the mien of a man who has been crushed by totalitarianism and lost the political spark and passion of his youth. He's not readily recognizable because of glasses and some hair trick. "Actually, I send in another actor to get on with it," he laughs. "I'm never going to divulge my secrets."
Where did he pick up his accent? "Prague," of all logical places. In the dozen years between his Broadway gigs, he has developed into a perpetually employed film actor. "I've worked a lot in Prague. That's where Americans tend to make films if they want to save a little bit of cash. I suppose that I've done six movies there, so the accent was easy for me." So, too, he insisted, was the bombastic arguments of the first act. "The play gives you a lot of energy. It gives as much as it takes."
Cox's booming voice gets a thorough workout as well. He is energized by the demands of his role, he claimed: "It's an epic, really, and because you go through so many time changes, you've got to kind of reignite it again and again and again. It's tough. There is very little time to rest and gather strength. If I'm off stage, I'm changing clothes or wigs."
Nicole Ansari (Mrs. Cox in real life) plays the flirty, flinty Lenka, who fades away into the sunset with the elderly Max. "We love working together," she said. "This is not the first time, either. To have chemistry on stage, then go home together — on a happy note — it's like we're having a date six days of the week. Some people don't like to work together. I absolutely love it. I don't get self-conscious. I only feel he's helpful and great."
She owes the part to her real-life role, in point of fact: "Brian asked me to read the play, and I read it in terms of his character. I loved the play completely, and I fell in love with this character, Lenka. It was love at first sight, to be honest. I think she's smart and an intellectual, but at the same time she's found that what she needs is freedom. And, while I was working on her, I noticed that I was becoming freer, and I had to become free in order to play her. She totally opened up so many alleys for me."
Cox, a Scot and proud of it, was feeling pretty free himself in a kilt. "This particular kilt," explained his wife, "has our colors that we designed together. There was no Cox family pattern, so what we did was create this and patented it. Now there is a Cox traditional kilt." Continued...
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