The intellectual discussions can feel both obtrusive and almost garbled, because they are somwhat underdeveloped. Meanwhile, though Robert Jones's revolving set has potentially winning fluidity, the blackouts between each brief scene seem to take up half the evening, offering blasts of the aforementioned rock bands with only loosely relevant lyrics.That said, the ambitious scope of Rock 'n' Roll is always interesting and Jan's background is intriguingly close to the playwright's, almost as if the latter is imagining how his life might have taken another course. Major political and personal events occur offstage, just slipped in via fleeting conversational comments whether it's Dubcek being ousted, perestroika, Jan's year in prison or Eleanor's death.The trouble is everything whizzes by so hurriedly that this piece barely get to grips with its manifold ideas. Esme and others - during tutorials on Greek and Latin poetry - talk about lacunae and elisions, and this play is itself structured around gaps.

By the by, amongst other subplots, Esme's mother, Eleanor (Cusack in an earlier incarnation), has battled with cancer and, we gather, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett - who once serenaded Esme like Pan on her garden wall - has become a decrepit figure hounded by Britain's free but shabby press. Stoppard throws up stacks of ideas here: questions about our intense (or limited) commitment in love, politics and the arts, about ideals and practical realities (likened by Max to a double helix), about decay and renewal and where our identity resides (in mind or body) etc.Simultaneously, Rock 'n' Roll is a striking exercise in dramatic compaction as well as coda to The Coast Of Utopia, Stoppard's trilogy about pre-Revolutionary Russian radicals. Jan is himself kept under surveillance and reduced to menial jobs. Finally, in 1990, he visits the Morrows once more, discussing now-accessible Secret Service files with Max and happily hooking up with his daughter, Sinead Cusack's Esme Morrow, who was a hippy teenager (played by Alice Eve) back in '68. He is required to act as an informer but starts openly protesting - by signing Charter 77 - when his local heroes, the band The Plastic People of the Universe, are persecuted. But Jan is eager to support Dubcek's reforms and returns to his native land as a journalist. Though naively optimistic and actually more interested in his cherished record collection than political dissidents, Jan nevertheless finds himself frighteningly entangled with the authorities.

Jan begins as an expat PhD student and avid rock fan, treated as a prot? by Brian Cox's Professor Max Morrow, a bullish diehard Communist Party member. The passing years are also punctuated with vintage hits by The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd et al, and the action zigzags between Prague and Cambridge as we follow the life of Rufus Sewell's Czech-born Jan and the Morrow family who befriend him in the groves of English academe. This keenly awaited premiere, directed by Trevor Nunn, offers a whirlwind tour of Czech history from the Prague Spring and Soviet clampdown of 1968 through to 1990 and the USSR's liberating dissolution. The women's budding romance would have been fine as a 10-minute segment in Love Actually, but all the scenes of characters gazing wistfully into space make the mood a lot more like a funeral than a wedding.. Your rolling stone gathers no proverbial moss and Tom Stoppard isn't dragging his feet in Rock 'n' Roll. Match Point's Hugh Grant-alike, Matthew Goode, is marrying Piper Perabo, who proves she can do an English accent as well as Gwyneth and Ren? But on their wedding day, Perabo catches sight of a florist, Lena Headey, and realises she hasn't just married the wrong man, she was wrong to marry a man at all. Richard Curtis forgot to include a lesbian strand in Love Actually, so the makers of Imagine Me and You have provided one for him.

In the turn of the dial, Travis Bickle has changed - he is a damaged man trying to save his city. With music, the film has gone from a bloody slice of life in 1970s New York to an opera with libretto by Dostoyevsky.That's so hard to do, it takes genius. And it may require a difficult man.A season of films scored by Bernard Herrmann is being screened at the National Film Theatre, SE1, 1- 31 July, 020 7928 3232d.thomson independent.co.uk. Then turn on the sound track and sink into the deep, wounded romanticism of that saxophone score. Yet Scorsese believed his film had a rare soul that the music might indicate Look at Taxi Driver, without the sound You know the story, you know the talk Feel the paranoia, the violence, the jittery dread. From Mean Streets to GoodFellas, his films are anthologies of contemporary music.