Rock 'n' Roll (play)
| Rock 'n' Roll | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Tom Stoppard |
| Characters | Jan Max Eleanor Esme Interrogator Nigel Ferdinand Young Esme Alice Gillian Magda Deirdre Piper State Security Officer 1 Stephen Milan State Security Officer 2 Jaroslav Lenka Candida |
| Date premiered | 3 June 2006 |
| Original language | English |
| Setting | Prague, Czechoslovakia and Cambridge, England from 1968 to 1990 |
Rock 'n' Roll is a play by British playwright Tom Stoppard that premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2006.
The play is concerned with the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the socialist movement in Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Taking place in Cambridge, England and in Prague, the play contrasts the attitudes of a young Czech PhD student and rock music fan who becomes appalled by the repressive regime in his home country with those of his British Marxist professor who unrepentantly continues to believe in the Soviet ideal.
The play takes place over several decades from the late 1960s until 1990, ending with a concert given by The Rolling Stones that year in Prague. Recurrent references are made to a glimpse by one of the main characters of the young Syd Barrett performing Golden Hair. Barrett's physical and mental decline also plays a role in the drama (Barrett in fact died during the play's run). The underground Czech group The Plastic People of the Universe are held up by another character as an ideal of resistance to Communism. The poetry of Sappho is another recurrent motif; its pagan sensualism is implicitly compared with the anarchic erotic force of Rock music.
One of the characters, a Czech writer, is named Ferdinand as an homage to Václav Havel. Havel wrote three plays with a protagonist named Ferdinand Vaněk, a stand-in for Havel himself. These plays were distributed by samizdat and became a symbol of the resistance. A number of Havel's friends then wrote their own Vaněk plays with Ferdinand Vaněk as a character. Stoppard continues in that tradition.
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