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TheaterJanuary 2008 Rock around the bloc by Brooke Allen On Rock 'n' Roll at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, The Farnsworth Invention at the Music Box Theatre, Pumpgirl at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Speech & Debate at the Roundabout Theater. Tom Stoppard, apparently the most English of playwrights, is in fact a Czech. When he was a baby, in 1939, his Jewish family fled Czechoslovakia just ahead of the Nazi invasion, ending up in Singapore and eventually in England. His father stayed in Singapore to fight, but was captured, dying in a Japanese prison camp. His mother later married an Englishman named Stoppard, who adopted the boy. What might Stoppard’s life have been like if he had returned to Czechoslovakia? His new play Rock ’n’ Roll is an attempt to imagine such a life. Jan (played by the almost indecently charming Rupert Sewell) was taken to England during the war just as Stoppard was, but goes back to Prague in 1968 to participate in the Velvet Revolution. An ebullient, easy-going young man, he has studied political philosophy at Cambridge with an old-style Communist don, Max Morrow (Brian Cox) and just can’t bring himself to ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 January 2008, on page 38 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rock-around-the-bloc-3738
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Already a print subscriber? click for online access by Brooke Allen On Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall, The Lifeblood at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New Jerusalem at the Classic Stage Company, and Two Thousand Years at the New Group. by Brooke Allen On the revival of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County, and the return to Broadway of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming forty years after its debut. by Brooke Allen On the Wooster Group's Hamlet, the Manhattan Theater Club's The Receptionist, and Things We Want at the New Group. by Brooke Allen On Gypsy at the St James Theatre, Boeing-Boeing at the Longacre Theater, and The New Century at Lincoln Center. by Brooke Allen On In the Heights at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Almost an Evening at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, Parlour Song at the Atlantic Theater, and The Four of Us at Manhattan Theatre Club. by Brooke Allen On Conversations in Tusculum at the Public Theater, The Cherry Orchard Sequel at LaMaMa ETC., Gray Area at the Barrow Group, and Next to Normal at the Second Stage Theater. New from The New Criterion: ‘Free speech in 
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