Dominic West in Rock 'N' Roll

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Matt Wolf in his Theatre.com Review: “When this dramatist's characteristically intricate latest bowed last June at the Royal Court, it was impossible not to cheer the reunion of Stoppard and Sewell 13 years after their galvanic partnership on Arcadia: both men went on to win Evening Standard Theatre Awards for their work and would seem to be Olivier frontrunners, as well. It didn't hurt that Sewell—though 30 years younger—was beginning to resemble Stoppard, the two meeting in some kind of astonishing fusion, at once artistic and facial. 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… The greatest change 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.”

Emma Fielding in Rock 'N' Roll

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “Sometimes I despair of public taste. Look, for example, at the enduring success of We Will Rock You, Ben Elton's inane celebration of that naffest of rock groups, Queen. Five years on, it's still rocking, despite receiving some of the most vitriolic reviews in living memory. On occasions, however, there is genuine cause to celebrate the taste and good sense of the theatregoer. Tom Stoppard's Rock 'N' Roll was the biggest success of the Royal Court's 50th-anniversary season, before transferring to the West End, where it played to sold-out houses throughout the swelteringly hot summer—apparently the only show to do so apart from Billy Elliot... This is the show that, above all others this year, proves there is an audience for intellectually demanding work in the West End, and that sometimes it pays producers to cater for the highest common denominator rather than pandering to the lowest. I find myself almost embarrassingly in love with the piece, which seems just as fine, just as moving, the second time around… In the key role of Jan, an intellectual who is both imprisoned and forced to work in a bakery for 12 years because he declines to kowtow to the regime, Dominic West can't quite equal Rufus Sewell's charismatic mix of intellect and charm, but he powerfully captures the guilt of a reluctant collaborator and is wonderfully touching in the play's beautiful and redemptive love scenes. Emma Fielding is superb, first as a classicist riddled with cancer, painfully and passionately insisting that she is more than the sum of her body parts, then as the classicist's daughter, a hippy drop-out with an inferiority complex who movingly reclaims her own life. There is fine work, too, from David Calder as the unrepentant bruiser of a Marxist, viewed with rare sympathy by Stoppard, even though the character represents almost everything to which the dramatist is opposed. It is a generosity characteristic of this writer's greatness, as is the spine-tingling optimism and euphoria of the play's closing moments.”

[AD]Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: “No major playwright today so stimulates and challenges minds as Tom Stoppard. His Rock 'N' Roll, winner of this year's Evening Standard best play award, is eloquently holding on in a West End nearly two-thirds submerged in a sea of musicals. To see again Stoppard's epic of communist politics, protest and significant pop music with Dominic West, Emma Fielding and David Calder in the roles originally taken by Rufus Sewell, Sinead Cusack and Brian Cox, is to be reassured that bracing mental exercise for audiences is still permitted on the commercial London stage. Nobody interested in the suffering of those caught in 20th-century communism's iron grip will want to miss Rock 'N' Roll. Its producers, Sonia Friedman, National Angels and Tulbart Productions, deserve to be named and praised for taking a West End risk with such a distinctly intellectual play… In Trevor Nunn's rather ponderous production, not helped by Robert Jones's dull minimalist settings but powered by the sound of rock 'n' roll classics that separate the scenes, West captures the dogged stoicism, vulnerabilities, introversion and charm of Jan: only his continual, almost manic hand-waving distracts. Emma Fielding's Eleanor achieves a sad, dying fall. She surrenders to over-emphatic charm when playing her own daughter, in a second act beset by Cambridge domestic soap-operatics that finally gives way to the apolitical romanticism that Stoppard celebrates alongside rock 'n' roll's anarchism.”