Review: Rock´n´Roll
Rock and love on both sides of the Iron Curtain
Rock ‘n’ Roll, directed by Kari Rentola, who moved from Lahti to become the assistant director of the Helsinki City Theatre, fits perfectly with the theatre line. Tom Stoppard’s play reflects Europe’s recent history with an entertaining touch, focusing on human relationships and the fates of individuals. Now is the time to include a play that is powered by rock and exactly 40 years ago, Europe’s crazy year of 1968.
The play is a three-hour blockbuster consisting of episodes that depicts the events of twenty years on both sides of the Iron Curtain, in Prague and Cambridge. Stoppard knows his subject. He was born in Czechoslovakia but has grown up and built his career in England.
The events begin when the Soviet Union occupies Czechoslovakia. Jan (Santeri Kinnunen), a Czech who studied at Cambridge, returns to his homeland and, after the Soviet tanks suppress the spirit of reform, remains there until the walls come down.
Respecting the text
Jani’s counterpart in the play is his mentor, Cambridge professor Max (Kari Heiskanen), who swears by the materialist worldview and Marx, and who fights a mental battle to maintain his faith in communism.
Rock ‘n’ Roll deals with political and historical themes, but it should not be confused with political theatre.
History provides a framework for story, human destinies and love. The play does not break or reveal anything. Although no new interpretation of history emerges, the themes are treated in an interesting and lively way. The message is the fight against passivity and for thinking.
Rentola has directed the performance respecting Stoppard’s abundant text full of discussions and themes.
The performance will feature a lot of debates about socialism, dissent, Greek poetry, spirit and matter.
The reality of socialism, which deprives us of freedom, is evil, but the capitalist system and the more insidious ways of censorship also receive their share of criticism.
Complex people
The show is entertaining and funny. Rentola keeps the ballet, which progresses in leaps and bounds from year to year, smoothly together. The entire ensemble acts with skill. The characters are made into characters with precise physical gestures, but the characters are many layers more interesting than mere clichés.
Jan, played by Kinnunen, grows old, settles and becomes passive in Prague. Heiskanen creates a credible and fascinating picture of the last communism, which retains its sharpness, does not become bitter and finds love even in its old age.
Heidi Herala is the absolute dynamo and star of the show. In her directness, she does an exhilarating and touching job in two roles: first as Max’s cancer-suffering, sharp poetry researcher, and later as their daughter Esme, who has been left out of her own life. Finally, Esme is offered a new beginning.
The costumes are functional and humorous in their everyday epoch. Time passes, wigs change and fashion changes. The set, consisting of piles of bricks, offers a ruggedly simple setting for events.
The space is crossed by a wall on which the years of events are projected into the titles of the scenes.
Finally, the space opens up when the mental and concrete walls are broken down and rock is fresh.
People listen to rock and talk about it a lot. The music carries the performance both rhythmically and thematically.
The Czechoslovak band The Plastic People of The Universe, which Jani admired, became a symbol of resistance in the 1970s, unintentionally.
The fate of Syd Barrett , who was fired from Pink Floyd, becomes a symbol of exclusion and the passing of life.