There were times during Tom Stoppard's epic and unruly play, Rock'n'Roll, when the words 'Alas, poor Syd' kept jumping into my head. What would the late Syd Barrett - who was still alive when this play premiered at the Royal Court last month - have made of this messy, sprawling political drama which uses him so freely as a symbol of loss - lost dreams, lost youth, lost idealism?
That Barrett, the Pink Floyd singer who became a rock's most famous recluse, should be resurrected in these unlikely circumstances seemed curious enough even before his death, but has an added poignancy and perhaps even deeper symbolism now. 'I wanted to write about somebody who simply got off the train,' Stoppard has said, but Syd didn't so much 'get off the train' as fall headlong on to the tracks. A Sixties acid casualty, he remained fragile and unbalanced for the remainder of his life, hiding from the world in his mother's house in Cambridge.
It is the myth of Syd Barrett, then, that stalks Rock'n'Roll, which transferred to the West End last week. He first appears as the curtain rises, a mysterious Pan-like figure perched on a garden wall playing a penny whistle to a flower child called Esme, and is alluded to throughout as a manifestation of something beautiful that has been irrevocably lost. What was more problematic for me was the moment when the damaged, reclusive Syd became a looming presence. While the ageing Esme (Sinead Cusack) still idealises the ideal of the young and beautiful Barrett, her teenage daughter, Alice, has actually befriended the real Syd, and shields him from persistent fans and tabloid hacks. Alice's post-dinner party assault on the tabloid columnist Candida makes for one of the play's more dramatic scenes, but this coralling of a segment of Syd's sad life seemed somehow intrusive, almost disrespectful.
The other much less spectral musical presence in Rock'n'Roll is the Plastic People of the Universe, the legendary Czechoslovakian art-rock group whose antics so infuriated the authorities that the band's members were arrested in the Seventies. Jan (Rufus Sewell), Stoppard's central character, and the closest to him in age and outlook, is a rock obsessive who recognises a rare kind of freedom in the Plastics' lack of political commitment. This disengagement becomes a threat to ideologues of whatever hue.
Personally, I would have liked to have heard a lot more of the Plastics' anarchic music, a kind of rough-hewn and ragged counterpoint to Barrett's dark whimsy. I was unsure quite what Stoppard was saying with his soundtrack. Loud snatches of music were used to no other end than to mark the passing of time, and to give the stage hands time to rearrange the set. The graphics projected on a black curtain were effective, but did we really need to know who the individual members of every group were? Oddly, too, the play, which is ambitious to the point of overloaded, seems to lose momentum as it moves closer to the present, and the soundtrack moves from the sublime - early Floyd, Velvet Underground - to the faintly ridiculous - late Floyd, Guns 'N' Roses. Perhaps this was deeply symbolic, too, though.
For me the best moments in Rock'n'Roll were the most heartbreaking. Jan returning home to find his beloved record collection in pieces on the floor, a vivid image of the petty vindictiveness that defines all repressive states. The line that stuck in my head was not from a Syd Barrett song, though it could well have been. It is voiced by Jan in one of his many explosive arguments with Professor Morrow (Brian Cox), a Cambridge intellectual and party member. 'Perhaps,' says Jan, referring to Marx's vision of communism, 'we aren't good enough for this beautiful idea.' All the play's themes of idealism, beauty, art, ideology and loss of self seemed somehow embedded in that line. Somewhere, too, for just an instant, you could almost hear the Madcap wryly laughing along.
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