Review: Rock n’ Roll at ACT Theatre
The Act Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play holds special historical significance as the theatre was home to the Eagles Auditorium, where many famous 60’s rock groups performed. Pink Floyd, Steve Miller, Canned Heat, Grateful Dead, among many others, played in concert in the very space where Rock n’ Roll is currently playing.
Tom Stoppard (Sir Tom Stoppard) is a influential British playwright whose written many well known plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, On The Razzle and Shakespeare in Love. Mr. Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Rock n’ Roll is directed by ACT’s wonderful Artistic Director, Kurt Beattie, who kept the action and actors coordinated and integrated at all times during this quickly moving play.
It’s hard to do one liners about what this play is about. Spanning two countries and three decades, this drama covers in broad sweep matters of love, music, politics and Greek mythology. Another scope for this play would be how sex, drugs and roll ‘roll impacted Marxism.
Jan (Matthew Floyd Miller) a Czech University student whose in London in 1968 when the Soviets move into Prague with tanks. He decides to return to Prague to help his country, rescue socialism and his mother. He takes with him his passion, his greatest love his record collection. A collection of records by Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, just to name a few.
Jan stops by to say farewell to his mentor Max (Denis Arndt) and his family; wife Eleanor (Anne Allgood) and his teenager daughter Esme (Jessica Martin) on the eve before his departure. This household is a showcase of peoples passions and protest with contradictory social ideas. It is I, think the overall theme of the play being told. Max is a uncompromising communist professor at Cambridge. Who loves to point out where things have gone wrong including why Jan should not return to Prague. Eleanor is a teacher who because of her health, she has cancer, teaches classical Greek poetry at home. A keystone moment that happens when Esme at the start of the play meets who she thinks is Pan (god) of Greek myth sitting outside on their wall singing Goldenhair, well she is sixteen and had been smoking “weed”. The real person sitting there is Syd Barrett member for a while with Pink Floyd. Pan or Syd shows up in speech or actions throughout the play, leading the characters in interesting ways. The piper is part of the Gates of Dawn and the Dark Side of the Moon, both of them Pink Floyd albums.
Once In Prague, things do not work out as Jan had hoped. The action unfolds with the years. What happens to Jan, his friends, the band he loves and decides to follow, the Plastic People of the Universe, a nonconformist rock group. It’s all told in action and words to the beat of the rock music of the times. I thought this play was not one that you just sit back and view with ease. The characters all are complex living during a harsh time of unrest whose actions takes it’s toll on all.
I was not that geared up to see this play but it was a most happy surprise. It’s not just a story of one person’s love of rock music but a story of understanding and forgiveness in times of unrest. It’s a play well worth seeing with a well chosen cast.
A couple of performances stood out for me. Mr. Miller who plays Jan is marvelous as the person who is able to make you care about what’s going on, to maybe believe in change that does not happen overnight. You see his heart and his spirit through the decades. You can see how the music works for him during good times and bad times.
Ms. Allgood as Eleanor/an older Esme has dual roles and she is outstanding in both. I admit, I may be a tad biased because she’s wonderful in everything I have seen here in. In the role of Eleanor in the first act and her grown daughter, Esme in the second act. Ms. Allgood is able to present both with effective depth in her presentations. I thought she made the Eleanor come alive so bright even with her losing the battle with her cancer. The love and sharing between her Max was wonderful to watch. Her warning to the bright young student to not “shag her husband” while she was still alive was with feeling. As Esme, she can and does convey so much of what’s going on with her feelings for Jan in the second act just by a few words and her facial expressions. Her argument with Max about making a brain out of a beer can shines when her response is new age “That’s not consciousness. Have you read the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”?
Rock n’ Roll plays through November 8, 2009 at the ACT Theatre. For more info and tickets, visit www.acttheatre.org.
– Ethel W.
