Rock 'n' Roll. Tom Stoppard

       Rock ‘n’ Roll

       PLAYS

      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

      Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth *

      Undiscovered Country

      (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Das weite Land)

      On the Razzle

      (adapted from Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen)

      The Real Thing

      Rough Crossing

      (adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s Play at the Castle)

      Dalliance

      (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s 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 You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank

      Albert’s 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

       Rock ‘n’ Roll

       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 Václav Havel

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My first debt is to Václav 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.

      T.S.

       INTRODUCTION

      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 Jan’s 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 I’d 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 Kundera’s 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 Husák’s ‘government of normalisation’, which followed the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies.