Tom Stoppard - Rock ’n’ Roll: A New Play

Rock n RollPLAYS Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Enter a Free Man * The Real Inspector Hound * After Magritte * Jumpers * Travesties * Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land * Every Good Boy Deserves Favour * Night and Day Doggs Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth * Undiscovered Country (adapted from Arthur Schnitzlers Das weite Land) On the Razzle (adapted from Johann Nestroys Einen Jux will er sich machen) The Real Thing Rough Crossing (adapted from Ferenc Molnrs Play at the Castle) Dalliance (adapted from Arthur Schnitzlers Liebelei) Hapgood Arcadia Indian Ink (an adaptation of In the Native State) The Invention of Love * Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Part I * Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia Part II * Salvage: The Coast of Utopia Part III * Rock n Roll * TELEVISION SCRIPTS A Separate Peace Teeth Another Moon Called Earth Neutral Ground Professional Foul Squaring the Circle RADIO PLAYS The Dissolution of Dominic Boot M Is for Moon Among Other Things If Youre Glad, Ill Be Frank Alberts Bridge Where Are They Now? Artist Descending a Staircase The Dog It Was That Died In the Native State SCREENPLAYS Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman) FICTION Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon* Available from Grove Press

TOM STOPPARD Copyright 2006 by Tom Stoppard All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Rock n Roll is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention.

All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. First-class professional, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London, WC2B 5HA, England, ATTN: Kenneth Ewing, and paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged. Printed in the United States of America FIRST AMERICAN EDITION eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9536-4 Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com For Vclav Havel

My first debt is to Vclav Havel, whose essays, commentaries and letters from 1965 to 1990 and beyond were not just indispensable to the play but a continual inspiration in the writing. I am indebted, too, to Paul Wilson and Jaroslav Riedel for many helpful conversations about the Plastic People of the Universe and the Rock n Roll scene in Czechoslovakia. My thanks are due to David Gilmour, Tim Willis, Martin Deeson, Trevor Griffiths, Eric Hobsbawm, David West, Peter Jones and many others who allowed me to bother them with my questions. In the first draft of Rock n Roll Jan was called Tomas, my given name which, I suppose, is still my name. In the first draft of Rock n Roll Jan was called Tomas, my given name which, I suppose, is still my name.

My surname was legally changed when I was, like Jan, unexpectedly a little English schoolboy. This is not to say that the parallels between Jans life and mine go very far. He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East. The two-year overlap was the basis of my identification with Jan, and why I started off by calling him Tomas. His love of England and of English ways, his memories of his mother baking buchty and his nostalgia for his last summer and winter as an English schoolboy are mine.

If that had been the whole play (or part of a play Id often thought about writing, an autobiography in a parallel world where I returned home after the war), Tomas would have been a good name for the protagonist. But with Rock n Roll the self-reference became too loose, and, for a different reason, misleading, too, because I also had in mind another Tomas altogether, the Tomas of Milan Kunderas novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In that book there is a scene where Tomas refuses to sign a petition on behalf of political prisoners gaoled by Husks government of normalisation, which followed the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies. In the play, when Jan is asked to sign what is essentially the same petition at the same juncture, his response is taken directly from Kunderas Tomas, in distillation: Jan No, I wont sign it. First because it wont help Hubl and the others, but mainly because helping them is not its real purpose. Its real purpose is to let Ferdinand and his friends feel theyre not absolutely pointless. Its just moral exhibitionism All theyre doing is exploiting the prisoners misfortune to draw attention to themselves.

If theyre so concerned for the families they should go and do something useful for the families, instead offor all they knowmaking things worse for the prisoners. However, the primary source for this is not The Unbearable Lightness of Being but a polemical exchange years earlier between Kundera and Vclav Havel, which prefigured not only Tomass (and now Jans) accusation of moral exhibitionism but also Jans half of his argument with his activist friend Ferdinand, where Jan insists that the Prague Spring was by no means defeated by the Russian invasion. The new politics had survived this terrible conflict, Kundera wrote at the time. It retreated, yes, but it did not disintegrate, it did not collapse. Intellectual life had not been shackled. The police state had not renewed itself.

Kunderas essaytitled Czech Destiny, or perhaps The Czech Lotwas published in December 1968, four months after the invasion. The fact that it was published at all may have been thought to support its argument Jan For once this country found the best in itself. Weve been done over by big powerful nations for hundreds of years but this time we refused our destiny. But Havel was having none of it. Disaster was not a moral victory, and, as for destiny, Havel wrote, Kundera was indulging in a mystical self-deception and refusing to face plain fact. In the play, Ferdinand is briefer and ruderIts not destiny, you moron, its the neighbours worrying about their slaves revolting if we get away with it.

Kundera fired back a few months later (moral exhibitionism), and it should be said that both writers would have cause for complaint if the play purported to deploy their arguments fairly. Dramatists become essayists at their peril. The play does not take account of Havels Parthian shot in an interview years later: All those who did not sign or who withdrew their signatures argued in ways similar to Tomas in Kunderas novel Naturally the president [Husk] did not grant an amnesty, and so Jaroslav Sabata, Milan Hubl and others went on languishing in prison, while the beauty of our characters was illuminated. It would seem, therefore, that history proved our critics to be right. But was that really the case? I would say not. When the prisoners began to come back after their years in prison, they all said that the petition had given them a great deal of satisfaction.

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