I forgot to mention this at the time, but a couple of weeks ago, we went to see Tom Stoppard’s latest play Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Duke of Yorks theatre.
I’ve loved Stoppard’s work since I saw The Real Thing about twenty-five years ago and for a while I saw just about every production of one of his plays in London. But that’s a habit that I’ve fallen out of over the last ten years, so it was great to go along and see this one.
Stoppard’s plays often work by juxtaposing two completely different concepts – Jumpers was philosophy and acrobatics, Hapgood was espionage and quantum physics – and this play follows in that classic mould by telling the story of Czechoslovakian politics from 1968 to 1990 at the same time as tracing the history of rock music in general and Syd Barrett in particular.
If you have any interest at all in either of those subjects – or, indeed, if you just want to see a very well-written play, then I strongly recommend that you see this play.