Rock ’n’ Roll

BETTER RED THAN DEAD Cox clings to Nicole Ansari—and Communism.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Playing a reluctant Czech dissident and ardent discophile, Rufus Sewell undergoes a remarkable change in the 22 years covered by Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll. Sewell’s Jan starts as a frisky, irreverent optimist and ends as a cringing, broken man. As a hard-core English Communist who refuses to quit the party even after his comrades have jumped ship in the 1960s, Brian Cox’s Cambridge professor Max Morrow doesn’t change a jot. Sure, by the end of the play his mind and body are breaking down, but Max sticks to his Marxist, collectivizing guns. Mutation and rigidity are the themes of Stoppard’s rhetorically rich if dramatically uneven new play. Not for nothing does he seize on an actual Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe, as the story’s offstage heroes. Plasticity is precisely what Jan and Max lack.

Stoppard has been over this ground before, in The Coast of Utopia: Ideologues are dangerous, life is messy and more beautiful than the most elegant theory of social reform, and systems will eventually plague their creators. Happily, the playwright limits his frame to three hours, making it less of a repetitive, didactic slog.

And Cox and Sewell are grand, Cox glaring and bellowing through Stoppard’s soaring speeches, Sewell finding grace notes of sorrow and pathos in his jokes and small talk. Despite what hype you may hear, though, this is not Stoppard’s watershed emotional masterpiece. It’s still three-fourths brainy bloviation, one-fourth clumsily structured TV drama. Worst, he refuses to give Cox’s absurdly doctrinal Communist (an intellectual bully only this playwright could love) his proper comeuppance. Such absence of moral courage causes the work to conservatively fade away, not burn out in a blaze of rock glory.