A dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, Ancient Greek poet Sappho, Mick Jagger, the god Pan (or is it Pink Floyd guitarist “Syd” Barrett, just dumped by his band) and a rock-loving dissident baker all have their place in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play. It is a play full of political and intellectual argument that here gets a spirited revival directed by Nina Raine.
Set in Cambridge and in Prague, it ranges across three decades from the Prague Spring of 1968, ended when the Russian tanks rolled in, to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the end of communist control.
Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) is a PhD student from Czechoslovakia studying under Professor Max Morrow (Nathaniel Parker), whose belief in a communist ideology is still strongly held. Jan has fallen in love with England (and perhaps with Max’s daughter, though it takes a long time to realise there is a romance here), but as his mother is in Prague, he decides to go back there taking only the what he stands up in and his rock record collection. In rock he finds freedom,
The core of the play is the way professor and student develop their political attitudes in the following years. Max is seemingly maintaining his good relations with the Czech authorities and Jan works as a journalist given carte blanche for the column writes but knowing understood limitations, but he sees his belief in individual freedom expressed by the (real) band Plastic People of the Universe, whose nonconformism led to arrests and imprisonments. Jan’s own activities see his record collection destroyed and him in gaol and when released consigned to work in a bakery.
Along with solid performances of Max and Jan, which make a long play seem a short one, is an excellent double from Nancy Carroll as Max’s wife Eleanor, a classical scholar, keeping a watchful eye on husband and student relationships and calmly coping with cancer, and then taking over from Phoebe Horn as their daughter Esme to play her when older.
This is a strong ensemble company. Family and academic gatherings in Cambridge feel natural and Prague encounters are edgy, the State ever watchful. The Ministry of the Interior wants to get inside your head and Colin Tierney’s official makes you feel it.
The cast sometimes flood onto Anna Reid’s traverse stage setting to change scene in a wild pandemonium to some very loud rock. The audience appropriately face each other in opposition, but at the back of the stalls, the format didn’t help the acoustics for some voices.
Stoppard doesn’t take obvious sides. Max is disappointed rather than disillusioned: for him, communism “was the right idea in the wrong conditions for 50 years and counting", while in Prague, the Velvet Revolution replaced the egalitarian ideas of 1968 with capitalism. For Jan, there is a personal happy ending, but what happened to all that idealism?