The Yale Review

1 2 8 Y S A P P H O , C A T U L L U S , V E R A L Y N N , P I N K F L O Y D , A N D T O M S T O P P A R D J E F F E R S O N H U N T E R For all their intellectual brilliance, his plays lack heart: from the start of Tom Stoppard’s career this has been the reviewers’ standard take on his dramas, varied from time to time by the announcement that this or that Stoppard work has finally succeeded in dramatizing ordinary human feeling, finally escaped from the playwright’s elaborate and daunting (but also ‘‘coruscating’’: another cliché of the reviews) literary apparatus. At its premieres in London and New York, in 2006 and 2007, respectively, Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll was hailed for making just this escape. In notices, the word passion supplanted or at least supplemented the word intellectual ; Nicholas De Jongh found in Rock ’n’ Roll ‘‘the Stoppardian romantic heart,’’ Charles Spencer ‘‘passages of unbuttoned emotion ’’; writing in The New York Times, Ben Brantley counseled playgoers to get out their handkerchiefs for this ‘‘triumphantly sentimental’’ new work. Undeniably, Rock ’n’ Roll dramatizes a range of human passions. At times the passions are political, as in the angry disputes between Max Morrow, an unreconstructed Marxist don at Cambridge , and the Czech dissident Jan, whose allegiance has slipped from communism to the rock band the Plastic People of the Uni- 1 2 9 R verse. Or the passions are marital, as in the case of an early confrontation between Max, the champion of philosophical materialism , and his wife, Eleanor, who in slowly dying is fighting for the survival of everything in her that is not material, everything that is not her cancer-ravaged body. The mere stage directions of this scene – ‘‘He tries to hold her. Weeping, she won’t be held’’; ‘‘She tears open her dress’’; ‘‘She hits bottom and stays there’’ – convey its rising hysteria, the sense of an intimacy expressing itself in pain given and received; but of course the performances of Brian Cox and Sinéad Cusack as Max and Eleanor, for those who were lucky enough to watch them onstage, made the passions of this beleaguered marriage even plainer to see. At other moments, Rock ’n’ Roll presents more conventional and handkerchief-worthy feelings, as in the developing love between Jan and Esme, Max and Eleanor’s daughter. It is at Esme’s insistence that her father pulls strings to get Jan released from a Czech prison; almost at the end of the play, in a Cambridge garden, amid nostalgic memories of marijuana and Syd Barrett, the one-time lead singer of Pink Floyd, Jan commits himself to the lost and now found again love of his life: Jan: I came to ask you, will you come with me? Esme: Yes. Jan: To Prague. Esme: Of course. Yes. Of course. Jan: Will you come now? Esme: Yes. All right. I’ll have to get my passport. At both the performances of Rock ’n’ Roll I saw, Esme’s charming terse willingness got a big laugh from the audience, but the sort of laugh which is deeply sympathetic to the characters and which prepares the way for the frank rejoicing of the play’s conclusion, with Jan and Esme together in Prague at an outdoor Rolling Stones concert, listening ecstatically to the music: Stoppard’s ingenious updating of the celebratory dance which might end a Shakespearean comedy. In interviews, Stoppard has wearily or even indignantly denied setting out to write a play ‘‘with heart in it’’ (as he says, ‘‘No writer thinks like that’’), but he has never denied that the heart is there in Rock ’n’ Roll. In the process of writing, the play ‘‘became more of 1 3 0 H U N T E R Y a love story than I was aware of.’’ But in the same process of writing it also became crowded, miscellaneous, and idea-filled – that is to say, Stoppardian. Over its two acts Rock ’n’ Roll sets characters to...