THEATRE: ROCK’N’ROLL

THEATRE: ROCK'N'ROLL

By Petruška Šustrová

Everybody, even a journalist, will be, I think, sometimes seized by desire for something positive. And, being a journalist, he or she desires not only to experience something positive but also to write about it. I am only judging by myself: I don't want to complain all the time. I would much prefer to write about things beautiful and pleasant all the time. But it is not always possible: there is the "Anička" case, or the song about Major Gagarin crossed with the stars and banners George Bush adulation, and it is possible to find positive take on them, but it is difficult to comment on them without irony.
This time, though, I got myself a truly positive experience. I organized it many weeks ago, only I had to wait for it until last Wednesday. On the Internet, we bought tickets to the National Theatre production of Tom Stoppard's play, Rock'n'Roll. I had some qualms about it and to be on the safe side I did not read any reviews. But I had a strong desire to see the Plastic People band underneath the NATION TO ITSELF inscription - and it really did provide a moderately mischievous joy I was hoping for. The nation cannot be too bad, I thought, if it is ready to let big beat people into its sacred shrine. And I did feel a little urge to leave after the overture, scared as I was that the play itself might spoil a pleasant experience. I could hardly imagine somebody would be able to understand and describe an era they were only witnessing "from the outside". But it was not possible to get away, we bought our ticket for the centre of our row and I would have had to fake being sick or something like that.
Nevertheless, the play charmed me. The philosophical debates, that on the stage take place in Cambridge, were mirror images of Prague seminar underground discussions in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties, and we were listening to the very same music that alternates with them. I had to laugh at the notion during the interval - but at the same time I was thinking: can somebody, who did not live through these things really understand the production? Stoppard had to have very good advisors, since he managed to portray so well what was going on in the normalization Czechoslovakia. But is not the play addressing but a relatively narrow group of people? Judging by the audience reactions it was far from that.
But the second half and especially the closing scenes of the performance gripped me more than anything for a very long time. I did suspect, or maybe know, that rock music is universal and that it affects different people in similar ways. Suddenly I was witnessing people from different countries who don't know their mutual languages are able to communicate through the names of their favourite bands and through the record titles, and to understand each other wonderfully. But what I did not suspect was the fact that you can show with precision what the rock music means to its listeners and - excuse a possible megalomania on my part - to the society as a whole. This is something neither the words or the music itself can express. But the theatre where the words, the movement and the music fuse into an experience of a completely different order, is able to do it. Not always, of course, much depends on the author, the dramaturge, the actors and many other factors, but this time it worked. Maybe it's not even the same for every performance, maybe we were just lucky. But I definitely did correct my original opinion - that one is only able to record and to pass on those things one had actually lived through, because both Tom Stoppard and millions of other people had a parallel life in a vast country without borders, the country of Rock'n'Roll...