Two plays, two directors: Rock 'n' Roll and The Season at Sarsaparilla.(Tom Stoppard)

AT MELBOURNE'S Arts Centre Playhouse the e was a moment of awed silence at the beginning of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n Roll when Matthew Newton stepped onto the stage. And then chitter-chatter cartwheeled through the auditorium as the deaf explained to the deaf the delicate matter of his parentage. And then, as it were, with the invisible but surely benign smiles of Bert and Patti hovering over us, the play chugged off into the politics of late-twentieth-century Czechoslovakia and Cambridge, England. And there was also some loud, but not too loud, music.

Stoppard's reputation throws a familiar shadow before him--Stoppard the prankster, Stoppard the word juggler, ...