Rock 'n' Roll

Last night, the Scottish Lass and I went to see Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll with Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell.

First of all, Brian Cox could read the ingredients from a box of Wheaties and he'd still be cool.  No, I'm not silly enough to claim that he was the better Hannibal Lecter, but he's just always enjoyable to watch. (IMDB tells me that he and Anthony Hopkins have shared three roles - Lecter, Titus Andronicus and King Lear.)

Rufus Sewell, eh, not so great but Stoppard gives him a lot of lines that are, shall we say, tough going.

At any rate, I can't say I loved it as I think Stoppard bit off a bit more than he could work with in a single play (the story of Czechoslovakia post 1968, "useful idiot" intellectuals at Cambridge who played at being Communists but never saw what was really happening, the navel-gazing silliness of the flower power movement in the 1960s), but I must commend it to Chrispy and StinkRock for placing, of all people, Syd Barrett in a central role in the play.

Indeed, they play a bunch of early Floyd in the little breaks between scenes, including "Astronomy Domine" and "Jugband Blues."  (Bizarrely, they also play "Vera" from "The Wall," which is a great little tune.)

The play was so wordy and overwrought in places that it was a bit difficult to sort out what Stoppard was trying to achieve, but as I see it this morning, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd seem to be a kind of metaphor for all of the "revolutionary" spirit of the 1960s.  Barrett is a pure force of beauty who succumbs to insanity.  The machine he helped build, Pink Floyd, becomes a commercial mega force, no doubt skilled at what they do but lacking something of the pure nature of the Barrett craziness.  This template is overlaid on the events in the Czech Republic, where the Plastic People of the Universe are the apolitical force of nature that does more good than all the intellectuals who claim to take up the mantle of the people.  It's not clear whether or not Stoppard is claiming that the beauty is inevitably linked to being mad.

Yeah, as I said, it's a bit hard going for a single play.  But it was so unexpected to see the ghost of Syd raised on Broadway and with such affection.  If StinkRock and Chrispy look, they can probably find discount tickets as the show is ending in 6 weeks and the house was nowhere near full.