The Canadian Stage Company launches the 2009-2010 Season with the Canadian premiere of the Broadway and West End hit Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard. A sweeping, rapturous epic about love, rock music and revolution, the play spans two countries, three generations of family drama and 22 turbulent years of cultural, political and social change. Donna Feore directs the award-winning cast which includes Fiona Reid (The Time Traveler's Wife, Canadian Stage's Indian Ink, Arcadia, Night and Day) in the dual roles of Eleanor and Esme, Shaun Smyth (Canadian Stage's The Pillowman, Trainspotting) as Jan, the rock music-obsessed Czech graduate student and Kenneth Welsh (George Romero's Duel of the Dead, Broadway production of The Real Thing) as British Marxist professor Max. A co-production with Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, Rock ‘n' Roll runs September 28 to October 24, 2009 (media night: October 1) at Toronto's Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front Street East) and transfers to Edmonton, November 7 to 29, 2009. For tickets and information, contact 416-368-3110 or canstage.com.
Rock ‘n' Roll is Stoppard's most recent and personal work to date. It premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in June 2006 and on Broadway in November 2007 and was nominated for four Tony Awards, four Olivier Awards and won the Critics' Circle and Evening Standard Awards for Best Play. The play explores the unique intersection of politics and music, and pulses with a dynamic soundtrack featuring the most influential bands of the era such as Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and U2 with 21 songs that have not only defined Western culture, but have inspired significant cultural, political and social change. The story follows the passions and politics of a Marxist professor in Cambridge, his music-obsessed Czech protégé fighting for freedom in his Soviet-dominated homeland and the travails of the legendary and groundbreaking Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. The band's incarceration by Communist authorities instigated Czech writers, musicians, and artists to form the now world-renowned human rights petition Charter 77, which was the precursor to the national revolution that occurred 12 years later.
"Stoppard's theatre thrives on historical ‘what if's'. Throughout his body of work he has delighted in provoking unlikely encounters between real and fictional characters to reveal some of the essential political and human undercurrents at work in today's society," states The Canadian Stage Company's Artistic and General Director Matthew Jocelyn. "Rock ‘n' Roll has an added ‘what if' component," continues Jocelyn. "Like his hero Jan, Tom Stoppard (originally named Tomáš Straussler) was born to Jewish parents in the town of Ziln, Czechoslovakia in the late 1930's. Both families fled the invading Nazis, though in the play Jan's family returns to Czechoslovakia shortly after. While the parallels end there, it is clear that Stoppard has a special connection to this story and that the play's thematic debate about projected and lost utopias is fed by a deep emotional connection to his characters and the quandary of their lives. And so this play which on the surface appears to grapple with one of the great ideological struggles of our times, in the end reminds us of the profound place of the human within any debate of ideas, the importance of love in our lives, how we deal with the deception of unfulfilled ambition, and how to go on living in a world which is never as we had hoped we might make it."
It's August 1968, just after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, as Russian tanks roll into Prague under the rule of Alexander Dub?ek. The play begins at Professor Max Morrow's (Kenneth Welsh) home in Cambridge, England. Eleanor (Fiona Reid), Max's wife, has lost a breast to cancer, and their 16-year-old daughter Esme is beginning to embrace hippie culture. Despite increasing Soviet aggression, Max defends his Marxist idealism; his Czech protégé Jan (Shaun Smyth) defends Dub?ek as a reform Communist. Jan, a rock ‘n' roll enthusiast, returns to Czechoslovakia, where rock music is censored. His defense of a local band called The Plastic People of the Universe lands him in prison. Meanwhile, Esme joins a commune, marries Nigel, a journalist, and has a daughter. Act 2 begins in 1987. Max is a widower. Esme and Nigel's marriage has dissolved and their daughter, Alice, is a 16-year-old student. Jan is in Prague; he has been tagged a dissident by authorities and relegated to working in a bakery. He despairs for the future of Czech culture which has been suppressed by censorship. By the Velvet Revolution of 1989, under the leadership of Václav Havel, the tanks are rolling out, the Stones are rolling in and idealism has hit the wall. Family and friends unite in the Morrows' garden, where old arguments re-emerge and transgressions are forgiven. In the end, love remains - and so does rock 'n' roll.
