Rock 'n' Roll

Rock ‘n' Roll

P
LAYS

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 *

T
ELEVISION
S
CRIPTS

A Separate Peace

Teeth

Another Moon Called Earth

Neutral Ground

Professional Foul

Squaring the Circle

R
ADIO
P
LAYS

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

S
CREENPLAYS

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman)

F
ICTION

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 Václav Havel

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.

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. 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 Kundera's Tomas, in distillation:

Jan
No, I won't sign it. First because it won't 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 they're not absolutely pointless. It's just moral exhibitionism … All they're doing is exploiting the prisoners' misfortune to draw attention to themselves. If they're so concerned for the families they should go and do something useful for the families, instead of—for all they know—making 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 Václav Havel, which prefigured not only Tomas's (and now Jan's) accusation of ‘moral exhibitionism' but also Jan's 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.

Kundera's essay—titled ‘Czech Destiny', or perhaps ‘The Czech Lot'—was 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. We've 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 ruder—‘It's not destiny, you moron, it's 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 Havel's 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 Kundera's novel… Naturally the president [Husák] 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. Because of it, they felt that their stay in prison had a meaning: it helped renew the broken solidarity … But it had a far deeper significance as well: it marked the beginning of a process in which people's civic backbone began to straighten again. This was a forerunner to Charter 77 …

The scene between Ferdinand and Jan when Ferdinand has just had a spell in prison is again in debt to a robust exchange of essays, this time between Havel and the novelist Ludvik Vaculik in December and January 1978/9. I moved the conversation forward to 1975 (otherwise it would have had to occur in the interval); is not quite fair to ‘Notes on Courage' by Vaculik, because the stress for dissident intellectuals must have been worse after the watershed of Charter 77. Vaculik, like Jan, says that he's afraid of prison. He is looking for a ‘decent middle ground', and, like Jan, sees himself as a ‘normal person.' ‘Normal people are not “heroes.”' Echoing Vaculik, Jan complains to Ferdinand that heroism isn't honest work, the kind that keeps the world going round: ‘It offends normal people and frightens them. It
seems to be about some private argument the heroes are having with the government on our behalf, and we never asked you.' Heroic acts didn't spring from people's beliefs—‘I believe the same as you do'—they sprang from character and ‘It's not the action of a friend to point out that your character is more heroic than mine.'

A related point was made in another
samizdat
essay, by Petr Pithart, which made its appearance at almost the same time. This spoke for a ‘passive majority' of like-believers against an ‘active minority' of ‘self-anointed activists'. This minority, said Pithart, alluding to the Charter ‘spokesmen', inevitably became ever more absorbed in its internal problems and quarrels and lost touch with the concerns of the majority.

Havel, again in
samizdat
(the days of open publication were long past), replied to both Vaculík and Pithart as he had to Kundera ten years before, unrepentantly. All of these deeply pondered, deeply felt exchanges between intellectuals and friends living under pressures hardly imaginable by writers in the West would support a whole play of political and moral philosophy. But that play is not
Rock ‘n' Roll.

If it had been, if the playwright hadn't had other fish to fry in his allotted time, it would have been Ferdinand's role to speak for Havel. That's why I named him Ferdinand. In the first draft, Ferdinand had a surname, Vanek. ‘Ferdinand Vanek' is the name of a character in three of Havel's plays—
Audience, Private View
and
Protest
—where he stands in for the author. Vanek is a banned playwright. In
Audience
he is employed in a brewery, just as Havel was in 1974.