Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play [Paperback]

Tom Stoppard (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0802143075 | ISBN-13: 978-0802143075 | Publication Date: May 10, 2007 | Edition: 1st U.S. Edition

Rock ’n’ Roll is an electrifying collision of the romantic and the revolutionary. It is 1968 and the world is ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a sound track of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Clutching his prized collection of rock albums, Jan, a Cambridge graduate student, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks roll into Prague. When security forces tighten their grip on artistic expression, Jan is inexorably drawn toward a dangerous act of dissent. Back in England, Jan’s volcanic mentor, Max, faces a war of his own as his free-spirited daughter and his cancer-stricken wife attempt to break through his walls of academic and emotional obstinacy. Over the next twenty years of love, espionage, chance, and loss, the extraordinary lives of Jan and Max spin and intersect until an unexpected reunion forces them to see what is truly worth the fight.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Extraordinary, epic drama of politics, persecution, and protest” —Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard

“Tom Stoppard has written one of the great political plays in the English language. . . . It has a moving, throat-catching intensity. . . . This play shows him at his combative and tolerant best.” —John Peter, The Sunday Times (London)

“Stoppard’s exciting new play of immutable passions and mutable politics, Rock ’n’ Roll . . . is so flush with feeling that it never seems to stop trembling. . . . Stoppard locates the very rhythm of life. . . . [His] most emotionally generous play.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“Astonishing . . . There is an energy, rawness, and passion here one doesn’t associate with the elegant and witty Stoppard, passages of unbuttoned emotion that go straight to the heart. . . . This new piece smells, well, of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” —Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England with his family in 1946. Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert's Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock 'n' Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st U.S. Edition edition (May 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143075
• ISBN-13: 978-0802143075
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > History > Europe > Czech Republic
  • #53 in Books > History > Europe > Wales

More About the Author

Tom Stoppard is the author of such seminal works as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor, Arcadia, Jumpers, The Real Thing, and The Invention of Love.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Less Intellect, More Drama Needed, January 30, 2008

By 

John F. Rooney - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play (Paperback)

On January 11, 2008, I saw Tom Stoppard's Rock `n' Roll on Broadway with Brian Cox and Sinead Cusack in starring roles. Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia and left with his family at an early age to escape from the Hitler terror. The play is about the Communist rule in his native country and the power of rock and roll to help breach cracks in the totalitarian regime. The music of the young was probably more influential and revolutionary than the endless petitions by the dissidents.
As usual with a Stoppard play, it is talky, clever, more focused on the political and philosophical than the truly dramatic. There's no question that Stoppard is bright and witty, but unfortunately his plays can be murky at times. The scenes in the play are separated by segments of rock and roll tracks by the Rolling Stones, the Plastic People, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, and others.
The women in this play and his "Coast of Utopia" are more vibrant, more dramatically potent, more believable, and draw more of an emotional response from the audience than his male characters who blather on and on, and who are more political, more theoretical, and ineffective. One scene near the end of Act One between Max and his wife Eleanor in which she confronts him with the cancer killing her is an emotionally draining one for the audience and the dramatic highpoint of the play. Stoppard's women get to you in your gut. His men at times seem to be drowning in gibberish.
There are few playwrights as daring, innovative, and intellectual as Stoppard, but there are other playwrights who are more dramatically and emotionally disturbing.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Stoppard Miss, March 4, 2010

By 

Richard P. Bonine - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play (Paperback)

I saw a production of the play recently in St. Paul. I couldn't hear most of it--my problem, not Stoppard's--so I bought a copy to read and I was disappointed.

The play covers a very long period of time in many short scenes with many, too many, characters. The lives of the individual characters are not presented clearly. I had trouble matching couples as they fell in and out of love over several decades.

The play has a thesis, that music, that rock 'n roll, was at the heart of the significant political events that culminated in the independence of Czechoslovakia. I do not know nearly enough Czech history to form my own opinion but Stoppard does not make the case. So the play is not moving. Most of us would want to sympathize with the rebels but Stoppard's narrative is muddy. I came away with the view that Stoppard thinks the rock and rollers were effective precisely because they were not political. Maybe so but I don't see it.

Stoppard's usual wit is largely lacking. It would be unfair to say the play is preachy but Stoppard apparently felt he had to explain at length things that younger spectators/readers wouldn't know. The old Marxist professor tells us everything that has happened since 1917.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Play by Stoppard, January 6, 2009

By 

Peter F. Ash "math and literature lover" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play (Paperback)

I bought this play because I was going to see the Huntington Theater production in Boston and as my hearing deteriorates I like to read plays before seeing them. This is really a fine play and although it deals with big ideas it is a lot more passionate and less cerebral than I expected of Stoppard. I'm not much of a play-goer, but for what it's worth it was one of the best plays I have seen in recent years. I found it well worth my time and money to read the book, and it was interesting to see some differences between the Broadway version (documented in the book) and the Boston version in the last scene. Both scenes work well, but I think the Boston version is slightly tighter.