EDMONTON - Tom Stoppard's plays have been witty, profound and human. He is probably our best living English playwright and has won many awards along the way, including an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.
But never has he written with such passion as he displays in his complex and epic Rock 'N' Roll, a Citadel/Canadian Stage Company production currently playing on the Shoctor stage.
Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia and has remained vitally interested in its emergence from communism in the '60s. He never went back during those years but he has his stand-in character, Jan (Shaun Smyth), leave Cambridge University to return to his homeland just as the Soviet tanks roll into Prague.
In England, Jan is influenced by the fiery Marxist professor, Max (Kenneth Welsh), who profoundly believes that communism is humanity's great hope.
Each scene is punctuated with a rock classic of the era. Jan is a rock fan and music from such groups as The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead and particularly Pink Floyd provide a vibrant soundtrack to the times. A Czech group called The Plastic People of the Universe, performing an exuberant (and apolitical) celebration of rock, helped to bring about the Velvet Revolution when the government tried to suppress their "socially negative" music.
It would be a good idea to arrive early to read the chronology of the events, and the words and phrases of the time, in the program.
Stoppard's characters, as in real life, live in a state of flux, and the playwright refuses to have their attitudes and relationships reduced to single, consistent positions.
Contrapuntal to the political discussions is the three- generational story of the family of the Cambridge Don. In fact, the most dramatically wrenching moment arises not out of the pyrotechnics of the passionate politics, but when Max's wife, Eleanor (Fiona Reid), who is dying of cancer and has been subjected to numerous invasive surgeries, reacts to the inhumanity of her husband's intractable views. "I am not my body," she says.
"My body is nothing without me." This remarkable performer returns in Act II to play her own daughter.
Stoppard's passion is mirrored by Smyth who begins the play freighting all of his speeches with the fierce ardour of youth and we watch as he is slowly worn down. Welsh's diehard communist remains feisty to the end but this fine actor subtly shows us that, under it all, his lifelong commitment to socialist dogma is faltering even as he rediscovers his family.
The play is talky. Clever though the dialogue is, it lacks the incisive humour we have come to expect from Stoppard. There is a long, long dinner scene at the end that, I guess, is supposed to show us how these very different people find an accommodation, but it does go on. And Stoppard tacks on a strange romantic ending that seems out of context with the rest of the play.
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