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History in the making

Tom Stoppard rocks the house at the National Theater

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Miluše Šplechtová, left, outshines David Prachař in this nostalgic look at a troubled time in Czechoslovakia.
It was an opening night that the National Theater has seldom seen: the Czech premiere of an English play about Czech history and politics, featuring the fusion rock of the Plastic People of the Universe as a warm-up.
The presence of the Plastic People, that dissident rock group from the communist age, added a significant historical dimension to the Feb. 22 premiere, as they, and the music they loved and created, are one of the central motifs of Tom Stoppard’s richly intelligent new play.
Rock ’n’ Roll ranges from Cambridge to Prague between 1968 and 1990, years packed with more meaning for Praguers than Cambridgers. Jan (David Prachař), a young Czech philosophy student at Cambridge, is preparing to leave England for the troubled streets of Prague, feeling it imperative that he share his city’s plight after the Warsaw Pact invasion. He arrives at the home of his mentor, Max (Alois Švehlík), to say goodbye. A staunch Marxist who disapproves of Jan’s motives for returning, Max is forthright: “Sovereignty was never the point,” he says heatedly. “At the first flutter of a Czech flag, you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk.”
All that Jan carries back to Czechoslovakia is a collection of rock records, which the communist authorities immediately impounds. What follows is Jan’s awakening to the deadening grip the Soviets have on his country. He’s at first encouraged by the lack of retribution from the commissars, arguing with his friend, Ferdinand (after Václav Havel’s character, Ferdinand Vaněk), that he expected worse: “You would have bet on mass arrests, the government in jail, everything banned, reformers thrown out of their jobs, out of the universities, the whole Soviet thing, with accordion bands playing Beatles songs.” Yet, as the bleaker ’70s unfold, and Jan becomes a supporter of the Plastic People of the Universe, things become clearer for him.
Rock 'n' Roll

When: Monday, March, 5 at 7
Where: National Theater
Tickets: 30–350 Kč, through Ticketpro, Ticketportal and at the venue
Performed in Czech, with occasional English

Max visits Prague to see Jan, but still speaks from his heart as an unrehabilitated communist. “If it wasn’t for the 11 million Soviet military dead,” Max lectures Jan, “your little country’d be a German province by now. ”
It’s Stoppard’s strength as a writer that Max never becomes a straw man or cartoon, something that director Ivan Rajmont, and the terrific Švehlík, also adamantly avoid (Švehlík’s Max even won a few scattered bits of applause for his Hobsbawmian views). For Max, who is “as old as the October Revolution,” his commitment to the cause is sincere. Yet even this intellectual titan will make a grudging peace with the historic inevitability of communism’s collapse.
Trevor Nunn’s production of Rock ’n’ Roll at the Royal Court in London was occasionally plodding, something that Rajmont’s doesn’t escape. The primary problem is how to stage the shifting scenes that the play demands. If anything, Nunn’s designers made the better choice of putting the production on a revolve. Jozef Ciller’s design is far more cumbersome, with stagehands scuttling about in semidarkness with props.
Yet these two productions (Nunn’s continues to run in the West End) also share having marvelous casts. The original Max, Brian Cox, was an overwhelming presence onstage, lacing Max’s ironic observations of the world with lacerating invective whenever his political philosophy is questioned.  But, whereas Cox has a bruiser’s build, one you  easily imagine sharing a picket line with dockers, Švehlík strikes a more donnish note, though no less self-assured. Švehlík underplays Max’s rapier wit, something that Cox often pushed.
Rock ’n’ Roll’s first Jan, Rufus Sewell, is a hard act to follow, and Prachař, unfortunately, doesn’t quite make the grade. Where Sewell’s Jan carried the early maturity of a grown public-school boy, Prachař plays the character more boyishly — calculatedly so, with little “winning” physical bits that seem ill-suited for the intellectual Jan.
Miluše Šplechtová, first as Max’s wife, Eleanor, and then as his older daughter, Esme, gives a finer performance than the Royal Court’s Sinead Cusack. It’s a difficult assignment for the best actor: Eleanor is a cancer-ridden classics scholar, while Esme is an aging hippie lovechild. Cusack achieved Eleanor, but failed to make Esme come to life. Šplechtová brilliantly commands both roles, only failing at the very end when she strangely transforms Esme into a loutish British tourist.
Among the supporting cast, Petra Špalková’s Lenka, Jan’s friend and Max’s future lover, is superb, making one forget what her English counterpart was like. Recently seen in the film Marta, Špalková is a commanding actress. Her Lenka is both wildly cerebral and wryly humorous.
The joyful bacchanalian finish, when Jan, Esme and Ferdinand race to Strahov to see the Rolling Stones perform, owns a new, perfect touch that Nunn’s production couldn’t possess. The stage rises to reveal the Plastic People — whose story saturates Stoppard’s text — performing live, again flooding the gilted tiers of the National with raucous blasts.
At the premiere, the conclusion brought the audience to its feet — for this intelligent  play, for its playwright (the great Stoppard was onstage to take his bows), for a solid production and for this liberating music played by a liberated people.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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