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
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.