Rock ‘n’ Roll

Library Theatre, Manchester

17 February 2009

Abba has Mamma Mia; Queen has We Will Rock You; Madness has Our House; now Pink Floyd has Rock ‘n’ Roll, a jukebox musical which weaves the band’s greatest hits into a narrative about The Prague Spring and the eventual collapse of Communism in 1990. 

The play opens in the summer of 1968 when Czech student Jan is about to abandon his PhD in Cambridge, understandably worried by the Soviet tanks back home.  His longing to return to Prague meets opposition not just from the Czech authorities but also from his supervisor Max, a stalwart of the British Communist Party who regards any criticism of the regime as treachery.  Meanwhile Max’s classics-teaching wife Eleanor is suffering from a highly symbolic cancer, and his drop-out daughter Esme may or may not be hallucinating when the figure of Syd Barrett (ex-Pink Floyd and now Cambridge resident) appears at the bottom of the garden disguised as the god Pan.

With a protagonist who spends most of his time in an anorak obsessively cataloguing his extensive record collection, Nick Hornby might have been your first guess as author; however Rock ‘n’ Roll comes from the pen of Tom Stoppard no less, so as well as hit tunes there are spies and sophistry, philosophy and philology, and adulterous academics.

Although director Chris Honer does his best, the first half of this play is too fragmentary to develop any real sense of drama, especially the Prague scenes where characters you barely know and care about less exchange information about things which aren’t really explained.  Never has Chamberlain’s comment about Czechoslovakia being “a faraway country of which we know little” been truer.  Ironically the classics tutorials in a Cambridge back garden are exciting and engaging even though they are literally all Greek (and Latin).  Max is a memorable and charismatic figure played brilliantly by Hilton McRae in an edge-of-your-seat performance.  And Cate Hamer is a fantastic foil for him as Eleanor, a brave and intelligent woman who copes with her illness using pitch-black humour and a tea-cosy.

The groovy titles linking the scenes are by video artist Matt Spencer and create a kind of unity even as the 1970s flash rapidly past your eyes while snatches of Pink Floyd’s back-catalogue get an outing.  After the interval Prague and its dubious musical links take a back seat to make way for a tremendously exciting and thoroughly developed climax.  Sadly this is then followed by a concluding scene of such cliché that even the writers of Never Forget – The Take That Musical would have blushed.

Tom Stoppard has gathered together an eclectic range of subjects and tried to blend them into a sophisticated cocktail, much as you do when you’re a student mixing any old drinks you happen to have to hand, however ill-assorted – alas, Rock ‘n’ Roll isn’t so much a White Russian as a Moscow Mule.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is on until Saturday 14 March 2009

Prices: £9.80-£18.10 (conc from £7.35)

Times: Mon-Sat eve @ 7.30; matinees Thurs & Sat @ 2.30

Box Office: 0161 236 7110

www.librarytheatre.com