"Rock and Roll' at the Wilma

There’s a reason that few playwrights attempt to write history plays that span decades across multiple locations. While Robert Bolt (with A Man For All Seasons) and Shakespeare (with Henry V) succeeded in sticking (relatively) close to an established timeline, the difficulties of unifying action and showing the evolution of character across many years confounded even the Bard more than once: Scholars still refer to The Winter’s Tale and Pericles as “problem plays.” When Aristotle laid out his unities of time, place and action in The Poetics, he was probably trying to hedge his bets against seeing bad dramas.

Few modern plays represent this challenge more than Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, now receiving an incredibly vivid and moving production at the Wilma Theater. In a series of scenes shifting back and forth from Cambridge to Prague trough the 1950s and ’60s, Stoppard portrays the history of competing ideologies through the lives of two intellectual renegades in their respective countries: Max, the last prominent Communist in England (the perfectly arrogant David Chandler) and Jan (Barnaby Carpenter), a Czech rebel against Soviet Communism.

Thus in Prague, while Jan’s friends go to jail for “free expression,” he squirrels away in his apartment, asserting his individuality through his collection of Western rock records. Meanwhile, even as Warsaw Pact tanks roll into Czechoslovakia, Max fiercely clings to the old Marxist creed, “To each according to their need,” asking rhetorically, “What could be more simple, more rational than that?” A sequence of significant events in their lives—the death by cancer of Max’s wife Eleanor (Kate Eastwood Norris), Jan’s arrest and imprisonment— merely reinforces each man’s resolve and commitment.

In its Broadway debut last spring, the characters may have solidified but the action remained fragmented, so that only the history of ideas bubbled to the surface, rendering Rock and Roll an intellectual exercise with little emotional bite. When I reviewed the New York production, I expressed the hope that the Wilma’s Blanka Zizka (herself a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia) could make more sense of Stoppard’s incredibly ambitious, though very disjointed play. And so she has.

Awesome images

Zizka capitalized on the play’s humor and intergenerational family relationships to integrate the big ideas into the lives of the characters and find an emotional depth that the Broadway production lacked. (Marx, for all his talk about “praxis,” would have been proud). The intimacy of the Wilma’s smaller stage helped, and Norris’s heart-wrenching performance as Eleanor showed that human passions, like Eros, “don’t fit nicely into a system.” Between Norris and Zizka, they even managed to make Stoppard’s otherwise obtuse discussions of cognitive science seem plausible.

But Zizka’s greatest assist came from Matt Saunders, who designed the projections that flashed across two giant screens above his abstract, rotating stage. Through still images and newsreels, events unraveled above the action, unifying the individual stories of Max and Jan with the sweep of history. Even after having lived in Prague, I was stunned to see images of tanks barricading a square that’s now bookended by McDonald’s and a Subway, or to witness a massive Communist rally in a stadium where the football club AC Sparta now practices.

Audience members laughed when they recognized the photo of the Wilma’s Jiri Zizka in his native Prague. But when the newsreel showed Vaclav Havel addressing the now free nation, I wanted to stand up and applaud, as Carpenter’s subdued performance forced me to transfer my emotions for Jan’s suffering onto the man who led the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia.

‘But we were not free’

In the New York production, Rufus Sewell’s incredibly deft performance as Jan left me horrified at his suffering, but Carpenter’s performance here displayed a realism I’ve seen only on the face of my former weightlifting coach in the Czech Republic— specifically, when he told me, “Under Communism, we had job, health care, housing, food, all provided,” and then casually shrugged, “but we were not free.” Carpenter’s Jan managed to capture that same look while discussing his sacrifices.

Whatever Blanka Zizka felt retrospectively about the history of her homeland, she at least infected Carpenter— and this production— with a spirit of forgiveness. After knowing that Communism had ended, Carpenter shrugged again—this time smiling— and I finally understood how Nelson Mandela could emerge from Robben Island prison, after South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime stole 27 years of his life, yet not demand massive retribution.

The dissident’s advantage

As I compared the over-intellectualized emotional one-note of the New York production with what Zizka crafted at the Wilma, I couldn’t help wondering: Does it take a dissident to truly grasp and convey the depth of the struggle? Is it possible that Arthur Miller could only write The Crucible because Congress forced him to appear before HUAC and demanded that he denounce his alleged compatriots?

But whatever enabled Zizka to achieve such depth, clarity and power in Stoppard’s pair of fragmented narratives, her production—coupled with Saunders’s images— not only encapsulated the passionate spirit of freedom fighting against a century dominated by ideologies, but burned the painful emotions of the struggle into ashes fit for the dustbin of history. The production ended passionately, triumphantly, and fittingly—at a Rolling Stones concert in Strahov Stadium.

Francis Fukuyama argued that history ended with the collapse of communism. Maybe so, maybe not. In any case, the world— from Georgia to Taiwan to Afghanistan—will always need the spirit that Blanka Zizka found in Stoppard’s Rock and Roll.