Dominic West in Rock 'N' Roll

In the months since, Rock 'N' Roll has moved to the Duke of York's for a commercial run and is inching closer to a Broadway transfer that is expected to re-team Sewell and his original leading lady, Sinead Cusack. So what of a play—and production—now shorn of that first cast? With a kind of precision one feels this particular writer would especially find intriguing, the new company works as an almost exact complement to the inaugural one. Take, for instance, the dual roles filled by Emma Fielding, herself an Arcadia alum kept by theatrical circumstance from reuniting with Sewell, who played Septimus to her magnificent Thomasina. Appearing in the first act as the cancer-plagued Sappho scholar, Eleanor, and then, in the second act, as that same character's grown-up daughter Esme, a onetime flower child, Fielding does beautifully by the second part whereas Cusack did not, just as Cusack blazed an incisive emotional path through the first act in a way that Fielding—who is too young for it—has trouble doing; she's too pinched by half, even sporting a tea cosy on her head. But allowed after the interval quite literally to let her hair down, the same actress flourishes in a part for which Cusack was, in turn, too old, the senior thespian compensating with a somewhat dewy moistness that Fielding doesn't need.

Emma Fielding in Rock 'N' Roll

The new Jan—Sewell's role as the Anglophilic Czech academic and sometime dissident who does a spell in prison—is Dominic West, a stockier physical clone of Sewell who, to start with, has to struggle to come by the sweetness and lightness of touch Sewell brought to the part. That West more than gets there credits his ability to relax into the performance as the play itself relaxes: on second viewing, one is even more aware of the essential disconnect in an imperfect Trevor Nunn staging that proceeds in fits and starts before the interval only to then glide smoothly toward a tumultuous finale scored to the Rolling Stones. If early on West seems to be applying the charm from without, he's enormously touching in the renewed courtship of the now adult Esme in act two—their eventual coming together prompting the same rush of feeling on the romantic front that is accompanied by the play's parallel discussions of the death of Pan, a.k.a. erstwhile Pink Floyd band member Syd Barrett, who in real life did in fact die not long after this play opened.

[AD]The greatest change, however, is registered by the replacement of a blustery Brian Cox with a far more nuanced and moving David Calder in the crucial role of the unreconstructed Marxist, Cambridge don Max, who is both the husband of Fielding's dying Eleanor as well as the friend and mentor and father figure of sorts to Jan. Playing someone the same age as the October Revolution that has so marked out his beliefs, Calder gives us the human being behind the ideologue, even as his stated desire to reawaken anger gives way to love in the arms of a far younger woman whom, presumably, he can love body and soul in a way that wasn't always possible with his physically ravaged late wife.

As for the rest, the scene changes are still too long, and Rob Jones' set cries out for a rethink before it crosses the pond. (Then again, pretty much every Stoppard play in my experience has been scenically improved for Broadway.) But if you can survive the bumpy first act, you're in for a helluva ride, complete with a second cast who don't lessen the play in any way but, rather, liberate anew both its headiness and its abundant heart.

Rock 'n' Roll
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Duke of York's Theatre