Rolling with the Punches

"The problem with Tom Stoppard," someone was saying in the foyer before the show started, "is that he demands so much of his audience." I didn't catch the interlocutor's response, but I mentally seconded the opinion. After sitting through his latest play, the three-hour long Rock'N'Roll at the Duke of York Theatre, I'm inclinced to agree even more, especially since the demands include £48.00 for a ticket in the stalls. Apparently, the mere name of Tom Stoppard is enough to warrant a West End opening without an initial subsidised run at the National; and on a Tuesday night the theatre was packed. The names involved in the production were not unknowns, either: Trevor Nunn directed, while Rufus Sewell played the lead.

But while Tom Stoppard has never written plays that are in any way easy, from the play that first made his name, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, to his most accessible and enjoyable play, The Real Thing, the demands he makes on his actors and audience don't go unrewarded. Arcadia, a beautiful and elegant play on every level, has you struggling in your seat, like attending a complicated lecture; but at the end of it comes a moment of intellectual and emotional illumination that makes it all worthwhile. Arcadia is also the play which I would say marked a turning-point to what future critics will probably lump into a different phase of his career as a playwright, one which, as a theatre-goer, I rather wish he would snap out of. The linguistic pyrotechnics are no longer flashes of brilliant wit, but set-pieces, oftentimes with a soapbox slant. The dullness reached its height in his trilogy The Coast of Utopia, a wagnerian three-part cycle of words that I couldn't get through as a reader; I wondered if it had to be seen as theatre, but I'm beginning to doubt if it would have been any less unbearable.

Critics tend to be deferential to Mr Stoppard, and though no one seemed to have the temerity to say anything really bad about The Coast of Utopia, I think they were fairly hard-pressed to try and like it. Rock'N'Roll has been hailed as a return to the old Stoppard, and though I felt it was a fairly gruelling evening, there were a few good laughs; more importantly, there was a strong attempt to engage the audience on more than an intellectual level. The characters were real, even if they did occasionally launch into diatribes; but that's the great danger of a political play. Rock'n'Roll is, despite its name, about communism. I'm not a highly politicised individual, nor did I live through the most important period of the play (the decade or so after 1968); my grasp of modern Czech history is fairly weak; and I'm not even into rock'n'roll. But not being into landscaping didn't stop me from enjoying Arcadia, and the metaphor of the survivial of a rock band as the tribulations of freedom was an inspired one. Walking out of the theatre one doesn't get the immense satisfaction that I got after seeing Jonathan Pryce in The Real Thing; in fact, I wasn't sure whether I actually liked the play or not. It wasn't until a day and a half later (always a bit slow, this girl is) that it all came together. Going two rounds with Stoppard's brain isn't exactly what most would call a rock and rollicking night out at the thee-atre, but I'm up for a rematch.