It's dull.
I know, I know, it's well-crafted. The vicious hothouse atmosphere of left-wing academic politics is nicely detailed, at times funny, and sad. Max, the older professor (played by Jack Willis), is a standout character, and he plays an interesting True Believer (that is, a True Believer in Marx). The scenes of student life in Prague and Oxford will seem comically familiar to most people who lived through the 60s and 70s. And the set design (a sky placed as the background, with our perspective from street level looking up) is striking, and I suppose it has some relevance to the play's stories.
But there are long, long scenes of dry trivia, long discussions about arcane philosophical details. The fellow sitting in front of me (he looked like a professor of some sort), turned to me at the intermission and said, "My snoring wasn't bothering you, was it?"
The rock 'n roll reference...I don't get it. The play seems to have little to do with rock 'n roll. There are references to it, there are short music bits during scene changes, but I couldn't make out anything special about rock's influence on events, other than the usual one about rebellion against authority. As so often happens with a long, turgid play, the director blasted loud music in the last seconds of the play (the Rolling Stones in this case), perhaps to make one final desperate attempt at making you think that maybe you HAD seen something exciting after all.
It seems as if Stoppard wrote this play for a pretty narrow academic audience. How many people would understand the historical and political contexts?
Finally, near the end, there's some life, some drama, as the family starts bashing each other in front of us, some connections are revealed, people do unexpected things. But there's so little to get excited about at this point, after nearly three hours.
Does the Huntington think it can build an audience with this type of play?
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