Why you should be a bit disappointed by Tom Stoppard's Rock and Roll

So, anyway. after my long absence from this blog, due mainly to my getting a new job with longer hours (boo) and better pay (yay!) I thought I'd ring the changes a bit by providing a theatre review, because my entire cultural life is not limited to books. Oh no. Although after watching Stoppard's latest, I'm rather thinking it ought to be.

On Saturday it was my father's birthday (or near enough) and to celebrate we did the traditional thing, i.e. went to a matinee of a West End Play. (We're awfully cultural, my family - about four times a year, on each of our birthdays). I have theatre buddies for this sort of thing usually, but we'll get standing tickets at the Donmar or £10 Travelex bargains for the National instead of expensive stalls seats. Oh to be young and poor in London.

I am legendary among my family for being late to the theatre. The irony is, I am almost never late for things I have personally chosen to see, when they start at a reasonable time, i.e. in the evening. But to cut off half my Saturday daytime (which is the only day of the week I can go shopping, for a start) in favour of sitting in a darkened auditorium with a grizzled clutch of baby boomers who all remember Pink Floyd and the Sixties, not to mention one or two who look like they were probably on the Titanic - well, all I can say is that Rock and Roll, Tom Stoppard's latest outing, had better be pretty good.

And (despite the fact that I had to listen to most of the first scene through a door, arriving as I did five minutes after curtain up) it was. Pretty good, that is. Not great; not, despite Sinead Cusack reading Sappho and dying of cancer (you know it's Stoppard when ...) terribly moving or engaging; not, despite the ending which tries its hardest to make an afternoon in the theatre feel like a night at a Rolling Stones gig, particularly exciting. Full of the usual Stoppardian intellectual exchanges on MAW (meaning, art, whatever) without the customary level of wit and humour.

Jan, a wild-haired Rufus Sewell, is our Czech hero. It's 1968 (although we swiftly flip through to 1990 by the end of the play), tanks are rolling into Prague and art rock group the Plastic People of the Universe are being censored. This is Serious Stuff. In fact, it's politics – specifically Communism (hello Brian Cox as a curmudgeonly, unrepentant leftie Cambridge Don OH CHRIST THE PREDICTABILITY I CAN'T BEAR IT). And like almost all polemical/political theatre I've ever seen, the political bits are at best dully didactic, at worst a spanner thrown into the works that brings the whole juggernaut juddering to a halt.

I didn't care or know very much about the Prague Spring (apart from what I've read in Milan Kundera) when I went into this play, and I didn't care or know much more when I came out again - and I feel as though that's fundamentally wrong. Shouldn't Stoppard be trying to make us care, not only about the politics, but about the characters? I counted eleven actors (which included a couple of doublings, such as Sinead as her own daughter) when the curtain rose for the bow, and I think that's just too many for a two-hour play, especially when at least seven or eight had major roles.

The whole thing felt fragmentary, knocked together, and not in a good way; as though Stoppard had torn a few photos out of the family albums from 1968-1990 and made a rather slapdash collage with characters linked by a spiderweb of dotted lines (Esmee is in love with Jan, but Jan is sleeping with Magda. Magda doesn't know Lenke, Jan's ex-girlfriend, is having an affair with Tom, Esmee's father ...)

What does rock and roll have to do with it? Well, Jan's a music buff and has a room full of albums which the Czech authorities take and destroy. Is that the sound of the world's tiniest electric violin, playing just for him, do you think? He has a number of tedious and repetitive arguments with his friend/room-mate about censorship and artistic freedom as applied to rock groups. Extremely loud Pink Floyd is blasted over scene changes. Stoppard's masterpiece this ain't.

But, likesay, it's pretty good. It trots along nicely, and the regular politicky bits (Why I Have Not Left The Communist Party, How To Build A Democratic Socialist State, What I Did In My Cambridge Holidays) function rather like Channel 4 commercial breaks - five minutes to check your watch, admire the ceiling fresco and browse the programme. And it has got some funny bits in it. The actress playing Sinead's 16-year-old daughter is excellent and the character well-written and believable. Tom sensibly avoids a kiss moment when the love subplot is finally resolved at the end. Sinead gets some nice wigs, Rufus has had some Czech accent practice; Brian can add another curmudgeon to his repertoire and will probably be allowed to keep the cardigan.

But what is it for, after all? Rock and Roll is a pleasant afternoon's entertainment for pensionable Floydians, but it didn't rock my world, and I was left slightly puzzled, slightly disappointed (particularly after Arcadia and The Invention of Love) and really very unsure as to what, if anything, Stoppard is trying to say.