Review: Rock´n´Roll
REVOLUTIONARY COMPANIES IN THE CLOUD
Helsinki City Theatre films youth movements in the Czech Republic and England
The youth movement of the 1960s has risen to cult status. Right now, exactly 40 years have passed since the student demonstrations in Paris, the Prague Spring, and the occupation of the Old in Helsinki.
Especially in the United States, but also in Western Europe, drug culture emerged to signify “liberation” alongside other fashions that aroused disapproval. If it wasn’t nice to be high or spike, you had to at least talk about it.
From the point of view of social history, the phenomena of that time are particularly interesting because the winds of intellectual freedom also reached the countries of Eastern European socialism. The forms were also the same: psychedelia, hippie movement, mass concerts, rock, weed.
Raised in two districts
The Helsinki City Theatre’s spoken word play Rock’n’Roll (2006) manages to lead us to those boiling years in an interesting and even intelligent way.
Tom Stoppard was born in the Czech Republic in 1937 under the name Tomáš Straussler. However, the family moved out of the country before the wars, and the Czech mother married an Englishman. Thus, Tom has grown up in the midst of the interesting events of his youth as a bilingual and bicultural person.
The backgrounds of Rock’n’Roll’s personal fates stretch from the Prague Spring in 1968 to the time after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in the 1990s.
The play’s Max (Kari Heiskanen) is a left-wing radical professor at the University of Cambridge who is proud of the achievements of socialism. His student and apprentice is the Czech Jan (Santeri Kinnunen), a child of Marx and rock’n’roll, for whom the record collection is more valuable than relationships.
Add to this the fact that Max’s wife Eleanore (Heidi Herala) is a linguist specialising in classical poetry, and the viewer of the play cannot help but dive into intelligent discussions and debates.
The New Wall
The theme and story of the play are personally important not only to the screenwriter Stoppard but also to director Kari Rentola. He says in the theatre’s press materials that he gave up the entrance exams for the Cantores Minores boys’ choir in order to keep his “ridiculous, long hair”.
The wavelength, which is close to the creators, brings coldness and distance to the production of the play from the viewer’s point of view. Fortunately, Kari Heiskanen’s profound reflection is carried out in a strong and respectful comical manner, as Max’s analyses of Eurocommunism and Euro-eco-ism, who is aging at the same pace as the October Revolution.
Of course, the City Theatre makes “Finnish theatre”, but the Finnish image of the time is forgotten. Only one sentence mentions that the Communists also criticised the Warsaw Pact in Finland after August 1968. In reality, the events in Czechoslovakia had a significant impact on the division of the Finnish communists, so the Warsaw Pact was also strongly defended.
Due to the choice of stage interpretation, Syd, a founding member of the band Pink Floyd , and the band Plastic People of the Universe become unjustifiably divine. The story becomes an overview of the development of popular music, with the illusion of changing society haunting the background.
The basic elements of Pekka Korpiniity’s set design, the red-brick countertops, begin to be built into a wall, a new brick wall to replace the Berlin Wall, which was demolished in 1989.
Does it focus on building a new society together or a new wall between groups in different positions in today’s society?