Rock'n'Roll

February 18, 2007
Rufus has just won the most prestigious award in London theatre, The Laurence Olivier Award, for best actor for his brilliant portrayal of Jan in "Rock 'n' Roll". Congratulations, Roof!!

Other best actor awards Rufus received for this role include The Critics Circle Award and The Evenng Standard Theatre Award.

See Rufus talk about winning this award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards ceremony here.

Click here for reviews

We hear it’s busy busy busy in Sonia Friedman’s offices these days – and we can’t wait to hear official news of the first fruits of all that busyness. Friedman has recently expanded her production company with the aim of mounting more large-scale events, such as commercial West End musicals. She has appointed two new staff members - Lisa Makin (who has joins Sonia Friedman Productions from the Royal Court) and Pam Skinner (formerly of Really Useful Group) - in the newly created roles of creative producer and head of production to "drive expansion forward". According to Friedman, the West End’s most prolific play producer: "I remain totally committed to producing more plays and dramas in London and New York and will stay as closely involved in all the work as ever, but now is the perfect time to develop our work further." Friedman is keen to take on more commercial musicals such as The Woman in White, which she produced in the West End and on Broadway, as the company develops. She’s currently represented in the West End by the revival of Sixties farce Boeing-Boeing at the Comedy Theatre, and plans to take it and her other recent multi award-winning hit, the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Rock 'n' Roll, within the next 12 months. Those transfers will be helped by SFP’s efforts with the Ambassador Theatre Group, of which SFP is a subsidiary. They’ve set up a New York office and hired US movers and shakers David Lazar and Peter Kavanagh as chief executive and business affairs director respectively. ATG managing director told Variety that the New York office will act “as an import-export gateway”.

......The Best Actor and Best Actress winners of the 2006 Evening Standard Awards, passed out Nov. 27 in London, were both in attendance. Kathleen Turner, cited for her blowzy, boozy Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, confessed "surprise and delight" at the selection. "It really caught me off-guard," she admitted. But the prize will balance nicely against Bill Irwin's Tony when the two kick off their national tour Jan. 3 at the Kennedy Center. Irwin's performance — along with two others due over here after the first of the year (Kevin Spacey's in A Moon for the Misbegotten and Michael Sheen's in Frost/Nixon) — lost to Rufus Sewell's portrayal of a music-loving Czech in Rock 'n' Roll.

Sewell said to expect him — and the play, another political cavalcade by Tom Stoppard (set in Czechoslovakia, 1968-1989) and the Evening Standard's pick for 2006's Best Play — in New York "hopefully, next year." There is, he allowed "a bit of Stoppard to do here, stuff already going on" — an allusion to The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, part one in the trilogy that just cranked up at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont. "We're going to try and see it. I'm only here a couple of days. I've just finished a play. I'm just resting and seeing things.".......

   Thanks, Roof, for these 2 backstage photos (taken by me) and Nadine, for this last one of Roof and me,
    taken in front of the Duke of York's Theatre.
    November 2, 2006

Fielding and West play Rock ‘N’ Roll as show extends

Emma Fielding and Dominic West join the cast of Tom Stoppard’s critically acclaimed new play Rock ‘N’ Roll in November, as it extends for the second time at the Duke Of York’s, now booking until 25 February 2007.

Rock ‘N’ Roll, which premiered at the Royal Court in June before transferring to the Duke Of York’s, delves into the political and social situation in Prague during the years 1968 to 1990, through the eyes of Jan, a Czech student, and Max, a Marxist philosopher and professor at Cambridge University. The play is punctuated by classic rock ‘n’ roll music from the era, including that of Czech band The Plastic People, who came to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime.

On 14 November, West takes over the role of Jan, originated by Rufus Sewell. West recently played Edward Voysey in The Voysey Inheritance at the National, and his other London theatre credits include As You Like It at the Wyndham’s, The Seagull and Cloud Nine at the Old Vic and The Silver Tassie at the Almeida.

Fielding is to play Max’s wife Eleanor and daughter Esme, replacing Sinead Cusack. The actress has previously worked with Rock ‘N’ Roll’s director Trevor Nunn on Stoppard’s Arcadia, along with Sewell. She has also been on stage in the capital in Playing With Fire and Look Back In Anger at the National and Private Lives at the Albery (now No�l Coward).

West and Fielding will join David Calder, who took over the role of Max from Brian Cox last week. Also on 14 November, Dolya Gavanski replaces Nicole Ansari as Lenka, while Peter Sullivan (Ferdinand) and Martin Chamberlain (Milan) continue in their roles. Further casting for the extension is yet to be announced.

Special thanks to Dianne for sharing this photo, taken by cast member, Alice Eve, after the matinee performance.
Saturday, October 14, 2006

Many, many thanks to Rai for sharing these fabulous photos from her recent visit with Rufus!!

Congratulations to the entire company for the wonderful success of this production!!
Thanks for the photo, Uke!!

Dylan Jones: Even Tom Stoppard, surprised at how his baby has been recieved found it hard to stop smilng
The Independent
Published: 15 August 2006

What's On Stage
11th August 2006 - What's on Stage News
http://www.whatsonstage.com/dl/page.php?page=greenroom&story=E8821155311331

Whatsonstage.com theatregoers were treated to a unique insight into the music and the politics of Trevor Nunn’s production of Rock 'n' Roll, the new play by Tom Stoppard, at last night’s Outing to the Duke of York’s. At an exclusive post-show discussion, assistant director Paul Robinson and cast members talked about their experiences with the new play, which transferred to the West End from the Royal Court.

Rock 'n' Roll spans the recent history of Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution - but from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band came to symbolise resistance to the regime, and the British left, represented by a Communist philosopher at Cambridge.

Joining Robinson for the post show discussion were cast members Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack, Rufus Sewell, Alice Eve, Peter Sullivan and Nicole Ansari. Highlights from last night’s discussion follow…

On their first impressions of the play

Sinead Cusack: Whenever I get sent scripts as opposed to going up and auditioning I’m so delighted I say yes immediately. But when I read it, and I reads it many times before I started rehearsing, there was so much that I didn’t understand, there really was. All the political and historical and rock music detail. But I knew that I really wanted to play these two women. I wasn’t sure how I could, but I knew I wanted to do it, so for me it was exciting from the start and I’m enjoying playing here still.

Rufus Sewell: I’m similar to Sinead in that I didn’t understand it all, we had to work it out together.

Sinead Cusack: Yes, when I spoke to Rufus about Arcadia he said “Christ, I was three weeks into rehearsal before I worked out whether my character was alive or dead.

Rufus Sewell: When you get a new Tom Stoppard script through your door you’re kind of almost forming the word yes before you’ve even opened the envelope. There were speeches that I kind of got the gist of, and having worked with Tom and Trevor before I knew that there would be a nice grown-up to explain it all to me when I got to rehearsal, so I said yes thinking that in between the two bits I understood would be explained to me. So you get the benefit of us having spent weeks and weeks before we even stood up to rehearse just having been talked through it. Even within one speech, the connections between the thoughts seem so incredibly distant at first but you do it until they appear simple for you. But I remember I didn’t understand most of what was going on.

Alice Eve: I’m very lucky to be part of this, it’s quite phenomenal. I understood my part and as far as I was concerned that was all I needed – although, actually I didn’t; I auditioned on tape because I was out of the country at the time and I didn’t work out that Esme turned into Alice and so I did one of Sinead’s speeches and then Trevor said to me in the audition “um, you do know that you got it wrong?” and I said “no I didn’t get it wrong actually, I just didn’t have another person to read with so I did it as a monologue” – and I think he believed me!

Peter Sullivan: It was different for me because I got the play straight away and I was talking to Trevor about it for about an hour and then Tom said “have you got anything else to say?” and I said “yes this and this and this and this…” and he said “yeah OK.” And that was it. I got a phone call the other end of the tube and I got a phone call from my agent saying “they’re desperate for you.”

Sinead Cusack: You liar!

Peter Sullivan: The ideas are simple though, they’re saying copping out with Rock n Roll and extreme politics are no longer an option, we have to get our hands dirty and get in there.

Brian Cox: I was just fascinated to see Tom’s progression as a writer, he’s a writer who has been on a remarkable journey. I’d seen The Coast of Utopia which I had really enjoyed and I think this is in line with that in terms of a personal odyssey.

On how the death of Syd Barrett, who is heavily referred to in the piece, affected their performances

Nicole Ansari: It’s a homage to Syd in a way and we were all very sad and moved by him passing and secretly I know a few of us were hoping he’d show up because other members of Pink Floyd came to see it and his spirit is so palpable within the piece we all hoped somehow he’d hear about it and come and see it. And then it didn’t happen and he died and it was really, really sad.

Sinead Cusack: I remember finding it very hard in the second act when we talk about him just after he died.

Rufus Sewell: I only found out just before I went on stage the night he died and it just made that line “does Syd Barrett still live in Cambridge?” seem really spooky, there was a different feel to it that night.

Paul Robinson on the transfer of the production

We’re playing to a much bigger house, so obviously everyone’s shouting, or feels like they are. No, they’re not really, but we’ve gone from 400 to just over 600 which does make a difference and they’re playing to a higher level here so they’re taking in and including an audience up there that can potentially feel as though they’re not part of it, but this company is very dextrous and brilliant and they’re dealing with it well. And of course it was a moment to re-preview in a way. I put it in here but Tom and Trevor were very hands-on with the opening process, they were here every night in the first week giving notes; Tom changed some text as well and the ending – not a significant total difference, but something that required a lot of work and I think that’s improved it. But it’s interesting, I’ve worked with Tom and Trevor before and I remember on Coast of Utopia not really saying anything because they were like demi-gods, but now I have nothing but contempt for them! They are both artists of course, but they are real craftsmen and I think Tom in particular is getting better with every new play, with all his new work he is incredibly hands on and is very much a part of it.

Rufus Sewell on his Czech accent

I’ve worked a lot in Prague over the last few years, coincidentally I’ve done about six projects there – nothing to do with Prague specifically, but I think making films is a lot cheaper there. I did three films in a row and ended up working with a lot of the same people again and again and again and I got very comfortable with the accent I think. I only learned two words in Czech, one was beer and one was horse… and I forgot horse. But I’ve spent years in Prague altogether and I had one driver for the past four jobs and I think a lot of him has crept into this. I think a lot of the mannerisms come from trying to communicate as a reaching forward and trying to make people understand.

- by Caroline Ansdell

Thanks, Rai!

This wonderful photo is from the New Yorker Magazine review of the play. Special thanks to Rai and her brother for sharing.

Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll"
Radio Prague
June 28, 2006
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/80581

Tom Stoppard, one of the greatest living playwrights, has written a new play called Rock 'n' Roll and it includes some serious Czech content. Set in two locations—Prague and Cambridge—the scenes shift from those taking place in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989, to those in England which revolve around the family of an academic Marxist, Max Morrow. The connecting point is a Czech student studying at Cambridge, Jan, who falls in love with Max's daughter. Described as a tragicomic family saga intertwined with a political drama set in Normalization-era Czechoslovakia, Rock 'n' Roll also features lots of rock music, including songs by the Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe.
A portion of the cast of Rock 'n' Roll London, 13 June 2006, photo: Patricia Grant A portion of the cast of Rock 'n' Roll London, 13 June 2006, photo: Patricia Grant
Paul Wilson is a former member of the band—though he's better known for his English-language translations of Vaclav Havel's texts, than for his days as a rocker. He was at the June 14th premier of Rock 'n' Roll and told me about the atmosphere at London's Royal Court Theatre on opening night:
Paul Wilson Paul Wilson
"It was very exciting. There were people milling around outside before the performance—there was Ivan Jirous, Pavel Zajicek, and Zdena Tominova who is an old Chartist, and various friends, my wife Patricia, and Tom Stoppard. We were all kind of milling around and then a limousine pulls up and Havel steps out, and whenever Havel arrives anywhere there is always a great rush of photographers and hangers-on and so on, so it was quite an excited arrival. Then we all went downstairs to the bar, and the Czech embassy hosted a reception for Vaclav Havel at which Mick Jagger showed up. And not only Mick Jagger, but David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and there were quite a few other luminaries around, so it was quite an exciting time."
It definitely sounds like the who's who of London society and Czech society was there. Tom Stoppard's new play is dedicated to Vaclav Havel. What do you think Havel's reactions were to Rock 'n' Roll?
Tom Stoppard and Ivan Jirous at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 14 June 2006, photo: Paul Wilson Tom Stoppard and Ivan Jirous at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 14 June 2006, photo: Paul Wilson
"Well, I know what his reaction is because I actually translated an interview that he gave to two British newspapers, The Independent and The Telegraph. He said that he had read it twice in Czech and had then seen the performance in English, and he was quite astonished by the level of sophistication with which Stoppard treated the material. Tom Stoppard is Czech by origin, but he never lived in Czechoslovakia. They had a discussion about which of the characters is Havel, and of course there is an old Marxist who obviously isn't Havel, but there is a young man who represents the kind of Prague underground, and then there is another young man called Ferda, who is named after Ferdinand Vanek from Havel's plays. Ferda occasionally represents Havel's point of view, but Havel's point of view is also represented by other characters—as Tom Stoppard pointed out in one of his interjections during these interviews, it wasn't just Ferda who was like Havel, but many others as well. So Havel was, I think, quite impressed with the play, and certainly enjoyed it. It's very entertaining as well as very enlightening."
Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel, photo: Paul Wilson Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel, photo: Paul Wilson
Czech critics have made much of the fact that there is a Havel-like character—or characters—in the play, and another character who seems to resemble Milan Kundera. Did you pick this up?
"The way Stoppard wrote the play was that he did research in the various discussions and controversies that Vaclav Havel was involved in during the late 1960s and early 1970s. So in one speech, the two characters, Ferda and Jan (the young Czech rock fan who later becomes a prisoner of conscience) have a debate about the nature of the invasion [of 1968] and the consequences of the invasion. This debate is in essence the debate that Havel had with Kundera, and Kundera is only represented in that one particular instance."
Mick Jagger with Vaclav Havel and Dagmar Havlova Royal Court Theatre, London, 14 June 2006, photo: Paul Wilson Mick Jagger with Vaclav Havel and Dagmar Havlova Royal Court Theatre, London, 14 June 2006, photo: Paul Wilson
"There is another conversation on the nature of heroism, and Jan says 'I don't want to go to jail, I'm afraid of going to jail, I don't want to be a hero,' and this reflects the controversy that the Chartists had. Havel had a public debate with Ludvik Vaculik and Petr Pithart about the nature of heroism in the dissident community, and this is reflected in the play. So what Stoppard has done is that he's taken various real debates that went on at the time and he's boiled them down and put them in the mouths of his two main Czech characters."
Now there is another element to Tom Stoppard's new play, and that is the inclusion of an underground rock band called The Plastic People of the Universe. You sang with the Plastics in the 1970s—did Tom Stoppard consult with you about the content of the story while he was writing the play?
Harold Pinter and Vaclav Havel, Royal Court Theatre, London, 18 June 2006, photo: Paul Wilson Harold Pinter and Vaclav Havel, Royal Court Theatre, London, 18 June 2006, photo: Paul Wilson
"Yes, he did. He consulted with me and he also spent a lot of time talking to Jaroslav Riedl, who is the top Czech historian of the underground. Stoppard asked a lot very specific questions about how the underground scene unfolded. What is mainly represented in the play is the coming together of these two currents—that is, the cultural opposition represented by The Plastic People of the Universe and the other bands around them, and the intellectual opposition represented by Vaclav Havel and other writers. What he's done is try to explain through the course of the play how the intellectual opposition gradually came to realize the importance of this cultural opposition in political terms. Of course they have a debate about whether or not it's politics or art, and that again represents a discussion that Havel once had with Ivan Jirous and Milan Hlavsa, who insisted that there was nothing political about the Plastic People. Havel's position was that it doesn't matter whether they think the band is political or not, that the important thing is that any authentic expression in that regime—in that system—automatically becomes political.

Playbill News
Playbill.com
Stoppard’s Rock 'N' Roll Makes West End Transfer July 22
By John Nathan
22 Jul 2006

PlaybillPhotoRnR.jpg (44076 bytes)

Rufus Sewell is featured in Tom Stoppard's newest offering, Rock 'N' Roll.
photo by Alastair Muir

Tom Stoppard’s Rock 'N' Roll — a political drama spanning over two decades that begins in 1968 and is set in Cambridge and Prague — makes its West End debut July 22 at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Stoppard’s latest play premiered at London’s Royal Court on June 14 (previews started June 3), finishing its run on July 15.

The production, directed by Trevor Nunn, was presented as part of the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary season. The starry first-night audience included Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s leading playwright, dissident and, after the Velvet Revolution, the country's first president. Also present was Mick Jagger, whose Rolling Stones music was featured in the play along with many other iconic bands.

In the play, rock music represents the freedom of expression that communism sought to stifle. Stoppard’s hero is Jan, played by Rufus Sewell, a music-loving Czech student under the tutelage of Cambridge academic Max (Brian Cox). Max comes under pressure to reassess his commitment to communism following Russia’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The cast also includes Sinead Cusack, who plays both Max’s wife Eleanor and their daughter Esme.

Sewell’s theatrical credits include Osborne’s Luther and Stoppard’s Arcadia, both for the National Theatre, a West End production of Macbeth and Rat in the Skull at the Royal Court.

Cusack’s stage work includes LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, the title role in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth for the RSC and Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind for the Donmar.

Cox’s Royal Court appearances include In Celebration, Cromwell, Rat in the Skull and, most recently, McPherson’s Dublin Carol in 2000. He’s also well known for the films “Match Point,” "Troy,” “X-Men” and “The Bourne Supremacy."

For more on Rock 'N' Roll, which is booking until Sept. 24, call (0)870 060 6623.

What'sOnStage.com
17th July, 2006

OPENING SATURDAY, 22 July 2006, Tom Stoppard’s Rock 'N' Roll transfers from the Royal Court to the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre (See News, 2 Jun 2006). The play - which stars Rufus Sewell, Brian Cox and Sinead Cusack - spans the recent history of Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, but from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band came to symbolise resistance to the regime, and the British left, represented by a Communist philosopher at Cambridge.

- by Caroline Ansdell

Rock 'N' Roll is now sold out at the The Royal Court Theatre. You can however, book tickets for Rock 'N' Roll at the Duke of York's Theatre from July 22.

Duke of York's
Box Office: 0870 060 6623

JAGGER SET TO TEAM UP WITH STOPPARD
http://www.pr-inside.com/jagger-set-to-team-up-with-stoppard-r8379.htm

Movie & Entertainment News provided by World Entertainment News Network (www.wenn.com)
2006-06-16 14:33:50 -

SIR MICK JAGGER and his production company Jagged Films have approached playwright SIR TOM STOPPARD for the movie rights to his play ROCK 'N' ROLL, following the success of its opening night at London's Royal Court theatre on Wednesday (14JUN06).
The two artists have worked together once before when Stoppard wrote the script for World War II drama ENIGMA, which Jagger produced in 2001.
But a spokesman for the play was not willing to confirm reports Jagger and the Czechoslovakian-born playwright were teaming up again.
The spokesman said, "If anything has been discussed, it would have been a private conversation between Sir Mick and Sir Tom.
"To be honest, it's not something we would have heard about yet." Stoppard's new play, which spans the years from 1968 to 1990, also features music by Jagger's band THE ROLLING STONES.

Syd Barrett, who is a major off-stage character in Rock 'n' Roll, died this past Friday, it was announced today.

Pink Floyd legend Syd Barrett dies
Musician a major influence on British psychedelia

Tuesday, July 11, 2006; Posted: 3:45 p.m. EDT (19:45 GMT)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/11/britain.floyd/index.html

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Syd Barrett, the eccentric guitarist who founded Pink Floyd but later left the music business to live quietly and somewhat reclusively, has died at the age of 60, according to a spokeswoman for the band. A spokeswoman for Pink Floyd told the Press Association: "He died very peacefully a couple of days ago. There will be a private family funeral." "Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire," the surviving members of Pink Floyd -- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright -- said in a statement. They were "very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett's death."

The singer and guitarist, born Roger Keith Barrett on January 6, 1946, founded the band in 1965 with Waters, Mason and Wright. (Its name was derived from two American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.) He wrote many of the early hits for the avant-garde rock band, including the 1967 album "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and the band's first hit singles, "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play." His songs were odd and charming combinations of childlike lyrics and swirling melodies, often augmented with strange arrangements. The titles alluded to space, the occult and sometimes nonsense: "Astronomy Domine," "Lucifer Sam," "Chapter 24." Consider some lyrics of "Bike," from "Piper": "I know a mouse, and he hasn't got a house / I don't know why, I call him Gerald / He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse."

Pink Floyd, taken under the wing of Beatles engineer Norman Smith, had early success, but Barrett, suffering from mental problems and heavy drug use, started demonstrating erratic behavior, including catatonia during concerts. He left the band in 1968. He was replaced by David Gilmour, who had joined the band as its fifth member earlier that year.

Barrett put out two noted solo albums, "The Madcap Laughs" and "Barrett," both in 1970. In 1975, during the recording of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" album, Barrett showed up unannounced at the studio -- ironically, during the recording of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," a song about him. He had become overweight and shaved his eyebrows; the other members didn't recognize him at first.

"Wish You Were Here" was dedicated to Barrett. Much of British psychedelic music was influenced by Barrett, and a number of musicians have credited him, according to Allmusic.com. In a statement, David Bowie said that Barrett had been a "major inspiration." "His impact on my thinking was enormous," Bowie wrote on his Web site. "A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed." Barrett had since lived in anonymity in the eastern English city of Cambridge. According to The Associated Press, he suffered from diabetes.

The spokeswoman said a low-key, private funeral would be held. She did not disclose the cause of death.

Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett dies aged 60
Tue Jul 11, 2006 3:32 PM BST

LONDON (Reuters) - Syd Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd, has died aged 60, a source close to the band said on Tuesday. "I have had it from David (Gilmour) that it was confirmed by the family," said the source, who did not want to be named. "It happened on Friday". Guitarist David Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1968, three years after it was formed and shortly before Barrett left the band.

Barrett, a singer, songwriter and guitarist, had lived the life of a recluse for the last 30 years. He had been suffering from diabetes, although it was not immediately clear what caused his death. The writer of the bulk of Pink Floyd's early music, Barrett had been credited with helping to shape its progressive sound. His increasingly erratic behaviour in the late 1960s has been linked to his experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

Pink Floyd's 1975 track "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", from the album "Wish You Were Here", is widely believed to be a tribute to Barrett. He was born in Cambridge as Roger Keith Barrett, and acquired the nickname "Syd" when he was 15 years old. He missed out on Pink Floyd's most successful years in the 1970s, which included the albums "Dark Side of the Moon", "Wish You Were Here" and "The Wall". The band has sold an estimated 200 million albums worldwide, although internal rifts have kept public performances featuring its main members to a minimum since the 1980s.

Thanks, Uke!

Rufus Sewell: Facing up to leading-man roles

The Independent
June 14, 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article994607.ece

Since the start of his career, he's resisted the leading-man roles that his smouldering good looks have landed him. But you can't buck the system for ever, he tells Charlotte Cripps
Published: 14 June 2006

It is 9.30am, and Rufus Sewell is eating toast outside a caf� in Soho when someone yells, "Pride and Prejudice!" in his direction, mistaking the actor for his fellow leading man Colin Firth. With his unusually large, light-green eyes and his dark, wild hair Sewell looks - in his thick black overcoat - more like the living incarnation of Heathcliff. "The chances are that when I get sent scripts, a few pages in, it is going to have a lone figure on a horse," says Sewell wryly.

For now, Sewell is horseless and starring in Tom Stoppard's new play for the Royal Court. Directed by Trevor Nunn, who has just exited the caf� with the playwright, Rock'n'Roll flits between Prague and Cambridge, from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to 1989's Velvet Revolution. Sewell plays Jan, student, rock music fan and the playwright's surrogate,alongside Sinead Cusack and Brian Cox.

Back in 1993, when the actor's career was just taking off, Sewell starred in Stoppard's Arcadia at the National Theatre. Directed by Nunn, he played the tutor, Septimus Hodge, and was nominated for an Olivier Award. "To be asked to work with someone again is extraordinary," he says, though characteristically he adds the caveat: "No matter how good an experience you have working with people, you are always left with the feeling that they would rather not repeat the experience."

The 38-year-old has not acted in a play since his acclaimed performance in the revival of John Osborne's Luther at the National in 2001. "I was offered a couple of ecclesiastical and romantic roles in the West End," he says. "This is the first time that a stage part that has excited me has coincided with the possibility of me doing it."

It would be fair to say that the actor's career is on the up. His role as a modern-day Petruchio, opposite Shirley Henderson as a wonderfully bad-tempered Kate, in the BBC adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew last year, brought the actor a Bafta nomination for Best Actor in March. Sewell confesses to mild exasperation that his adept comic turn should have come as a surprise to some people.

"What can you do if people don't see the humour in you?" he asks, adding that he had "to do a tap dance" to get the part of Petruchio. "They were concerned as to whether I was funny. I did everything I could to convince them that I was." It has been eight years since his last comic role, in the film Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence as Frank, the "embittered piss-head" former child actor. "Considering I am a comic actor, it's been a pain in the arse," he says.

Rufus Frederick Sewell was born on 29 October 1967 in Twickenham. His father, an Australian animator who worked on The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, died when Sewell was 10. He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and Dame Judi Dench, who directed him in a play, helped him to get an agent.

He made his big-screen debut in Twenty-One in 1991 as Patsy Kensit's drug-addict boyfriend, Bobby, gaining mainstream recognition in 1994 as the young and idealistic Will Ladislaw in the BBC adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch. He also gave a notable performance as the lustful, Trilby-wearing, aspiring movie star Seth Starkadder in the 1995 adaptation of Stella Gibbons' parodic novel Cold Comfort Farm. Less memorable, perhaps, was his performance as Macbeth in 1999 at London's Queen's Theatre.

Sewell has acted in a number of period and romantic dramas (Carrington, The Woodlanders, Dangerous Beauty), had several stints as the villain of the piece (A Knight's Tale, The Legend of Zorro), and played royalty (Charles II: The Power & the Passion television mini series).

The actor won't admit to a particular attachment to any of the roles he's played, but says of his breakthrough part: "When I played Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch, it was secretly a big experiment for me to see if I could play a young romantic my own age who didn't have a limp or a Latvian accent - and who wasn't a male prostitute. But after that, I was fighting not to play those roles for the rest of my life."

Frustrated at being pigeonholed ("but at least it has been a different pigeonhole every few years"), the only method Sewell has found to avoid being typecast is "wilful unemployment". But he acknowledges that such a course of action is liable to backfire. "You can wait so long for the right part that you can end up in a far more desperate situation, having to do something worse than you have been turning down," he says. "The trick is to try to keep life as simple as possible, so that you don't have so much to lose by waiting. But that's a difficult thing to do." For Sewell, a success in his chosen profession is a mixed blessing. "I have never really been able to reap the rewards of those successful roles because what I want is variety," he admits.

Sewell has diversified lately. There are a couple of films awaiting release. In The Illusionist, set in early 1900s Vienna, he plays opposite Edward Norton's sinister magician as Crown Prince Leopold, whom he characterises with relish as "a fiercely ambitious, jealous, paranoiac, tragic figure". For Amazing Grace, the story of the English abolitionist William Wilberforce, he is "a lank-haired anti-slavery campaigner" in a cast that includes Ioan Gruffudd, Albert Finney and Michael Gambon.

And the actor has just returned from Los Angeles, where he has been filming the romantic comedy The Holiday with Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet and Jude Law. "I play a very charming tosser who Kate Winslet's character is trying to get away from," says Sewell blithely.

Sewell characterises the LA experience as very "in and out", claiming that his strongest memories of filming The Holiday were of his hotel room at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. "I was there for six weeks, working one day a week," he recalls. "With a tighter budget, it would have been a week's work. But you can't really do anything in case they change the schedule."

He says he lived as frugally as possible, given that "eating and drinking when you are hungry can set you back $6,000 a week in that hotel. I made my own breakfast with my own coffee machine, loaf of brown bread and toaster, as if I was in a bedsit." He adds: "I try to avoid using my earnings to pay back the hotel bill. I went on set even when I was not working merely for the catering, and came back laden with cakes." He was back in England in the nick of time for the rehearsals for Rock'n'Roll in the backstreets of Soho.

Sewell lives in west London. Other than his relationship with William, his son by his former partner, the main focus of his life now is his acting career. Despite feeling "showbiz-knackered", he feels closer than ever to the career he has always wanted, though aware that it can be fleeting. "I am just enjoying it for the moment," he says.

The actor, who claims to be very regimented these days, characterises himself as "organised, sensible, and I make sure I get a proper night's sleep" - in contrast to how he sometimes deported himself as a young actor. "I could get away with reading the script on the way in on the Tube in the morning and getting no sleep," he says.

He's aware he has to be on top of his game for Rock'n'Roll. "With a Stoppard play, you read it, you think you have an understanding of it, then you realise you only picked up the surface and there is so much more going on," he says. "It is quite edifying, but you can't help feeling like an idiot. Part of the privilege of doing it is that it is like yoga for the synapses - the way Tom's mind works and the way his characters make this free association, but with lightening speed, with complete understanding. To play people that sharp, bright and eloquent is an honour."

The big Hollywood films, meanwhile, serve, to a certain extent, as a means to an end, Sewell admits. "Unless you get into that club, it can be quite hard," he says. "To have a certain amount of Hollywood success does mean you have more scope. I want to play more interesting parts in independent films. The same accountants run those films half the time. If they feel that your name means anything commercially, they won't panic about you being in a film."

Such realism aside, he claims never to have taken a role "without an open heart" - even in The Legend of Zorro, in which he was as surprised as anyone to find himself playing at sword-fighting on top of a moving train. "The trouble is, the more commercial a film is, the more likely that the parts that come my way are baddies," he says. For now, though, the fact that he is "still playing with the big boys" is what matters.

"It is wonderful that I am still in the game," he says. "That it wasn't all just a flash of success."

'Rock'n'Roll', Royal Court Theatre, London SW1 (020-7565 5000; www.royalcourttheatre.com) to 15 July
Thanks,Uke!

The first images of Rufus with Brian Cox on the set of "Rock 'n' Roll"
Monday, June 12, 2006
RnR1.jpg (9046 bytes)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/06/05/btrufus05.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/06/05/ixtop.html

Thanks, Rai!!!

The Times
June 10, 2006
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14929-2212876,00.html

At last, the return of the native

Brian Cox thought he’d left the British stage for good, but a new Stoppard play has lured him back. Ian Johns met him
Some ten years ago, Brian Cox turned his back on an award-winning stage career that had included Titus Andronicus at the Royal Shakespeare Company and King Lear at the National Theatre and headed for Hollywood. Since then he has cornered the market in bulky, brooding authority figures in such multiplex movies as The Bourne Supremacy, X-Men 2 and Troy.

For Cox, a working-class lad from Dundee, America offered a fresh start from a British theatrical establishment he felt had never fully accepted him. “They don’t see me in relationship to my class,” he told one newspaper a few years ago. “There you either cut it or you don’t. Britain is all about cliques: Ben Elton, Richard Curtis and their set, Melvyn Bragg and his bunch, Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre and their lot.” But now Cox is back on the London stage not only being directed by Nunn but also starring in Rock’n’Roll, the latest play by Tom Stoppard. It doesn’t get more theatrically top-notch than that.

“Yes, I know,” Cox says with a hearty laugh. “It’s like I’ve been sent to Sandhurst to be made an officer! But I’ve always spoken out about how I’ve felt at the time so I’m bound to get hoist by my own petard. But you don’t get the chance to do a new Tom Stoppard play every day. And I was flattered that he had written my part with me in mind.” He pauses and smiles. “The script describes my character as a bruiser.”

Cox, though a jowly, stocky 60- year-old, is a warmer, more thoughtful presence than that description suggests. He is as articulate and opinionated about the play as he is about the impact of uprooting his second wife, the German actress Nicole Ansari, and their two young sons from their Los Angeles home to do the play at the Royal Court. “My accountant is not pleased either, as British theatre doesn’t pay well,” Cox adds. “Even though my wife also has a role in the play, financially this makes no sense. We’ll have to have a yard sale when we get back and sell the kids.”

In Rock’n’Roll, Cox plays Max, a Marxist philosopher at Cambridge married to a feminist academic (Sinead Cusack). His beliefs are challenged by events in Czechoslovakia, which begin with the Prague Spring of 1968 and Alexander Dubcek’s liberalisation of communism, and end with the Velvet Revolution of 1990. Events unfold through a double focus: that of Max’s former pupil Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Czech dissident in Prague trying to avoid joining the Communist Party, and Max, refusing to leave the Party despite the Russian suppression of Dubcek’s regime.

“It’s a very humanist play about how different passions and ideas influence each other,” Cox says. “The drama reflects how political consciousness has ebbed and flowed through everything from flowerpower and feminism to music. In the West we had protest songs and ‘Make Love not War’, but it was a romanticised kind of politics. In Czechoslovakia rock’n’roll was a genuinely potent force. When I worked at the Moscow Arts Theatre in the late 1980s, I found that my students’ knowledge of English had come from Lennon and McCartney. Liberalisation in the Eastern bloc began through rock music.”

Out of a brief explosion of pop culture in the 1968 Prague Spring arose the later banned group Plastic People of the Universe. Inspired by the arrest of band members in 1976, the playwright Vaclav Havel formed Charter 77, a movement that led to the Velvet Revolution and the election of Havel as the President of the Czech republic.

“Max’s tragedy is that in sticking to his beliefs, he becomes increasingly isolated and seemingly archaic,” Cox explains. “One character in the play in 1990 wonders why Jan wants to revisit Britain. She describes it as having become ‘a democracy of obedience’. I look back at how socialism was sold out long before Blair and I agree. We’re still a classridden, feudal state that likes to pigeonhole people — it’s something I’ve always fought against.”

Cox did so from an early age. One of four children of an Irish immigrant family, he was raised by a sister and aunt from the age of 9 when his weaver father died of cancer and his mother suffered a nervous breakdown. “I was classified as being educationally subnormal, so I dodged off school and went to the picture house and lost myself in movies,” he says. “I got my yearning to be an actor watching Brando and Spencer Tracy.”

He left school at 15 and found work at Dundee Rep mopping the stage. Later, he got a scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Drama. A busy career developed working everywhere from the Birmingham Rep and the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh to the National in the 1970s and the RSC in the 1980s.

He has always been drawn to characters that are uncomfortable in their skin, whether it’s his Olivier award-winning turn as a tormented RUC officer in Rat in the Skull (1984) or the alcoholic father in Dublin Carol (2000). “As a race we Celts are self-critical, we have an incredible sense of pain and of being dominated and subjugated and pigeonholed,” Cox explains. “It’s both the strength and curse of the Celtic personality.”

Cox has also given humanity to such easily demonised characters as a pederast in the US indie film L.I.E, and as Goering in the US TV movie Nuremberg. And before Anthony Hopkins made Hannibal Lecter cinema’s favourite cannibal, Cox played the part in a chillingly low-key manner in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. That film should have been his calling card to Hollywood, but it came out in 1986 during his divorce from Caroline Burt, his actress wife of 19 years, with whom he has a son and daughter.

“After my divorce I wanted to stay in England to be near the children,” he says. “I have no regrets about not capitalising on Manhunter. As my mother used to say: ‘What’s for you will not go by you.’ By 1995 I felt I’d done all I could on stage and I sensed that television was starting to be run by uncreative suits. I’ve always known when to leave a party, so I thought it was time to try Hollywood.”

His brooding presence and rich, measured delivery tallied perfectly with Hollywood’s checklist for the ideal movie bad guy. Cox admits that he made a string of forgettable thrillers “to learn about doing movies”. Three forthcoming films reflect the current mix of his screen career. There’s the mainstream studio film (David Fincher’s true-life serial killer thriller Zodiac), the character-driven indie movie (Running with Scissors, based on a quirky coming-of-age memoir) and the home-grown production (The Flying Scotsman, about an amateur cyclist who broke world records on a bike made out of scrap).

“There’s a prison-break drama that I hope to do in Britain but, even after we’ve secured the finance, there’s the hurdle of distribution,” Cox says. “We still have this Field of Dreams approach to movies in Britain — build it and they will come. It’s all very well having a vision but we need more people who are able to sell a fil
Cox is well aware that his CV suggests a restless, workaholic spirit. “I come from a family of itinerants and I’ve never felt as if I belong anywhere so I keep moving. That may be a flaw in my character. It certainly didn’t help me as a father the first time around. But now that I have two young ones again, it makes me think that perhaps we should settle down. After Rock’n’Roll I’m not certain what’s coming next. It might be time to make some big decisions.”

Rock’n’Roll, Royal Court, London SW1 (www.royalcourttheatre.com 020-7565 5000), in preview until June 14, open until July 15; then at Duke of York’s, London WC2 (www. theambassadors.com/dukeofyorks 0870 0606623), July 22-Sept 24

Tom Stoppard: His soundtrack to a revolution
The Independent - Online Edition
8 June 2006
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article752201.ece

Tom Stoppard's new play, Rock'n'Roll, links music and the fall of Communism. Paul Taylor asks him why it is only his second piece about the land of his birth
Published: 09 June 2006

Rock'n'roll really is a driving force in Rock'n'Roll, the new Tom Stoppard play that opens next week at the Royal Court in a production directed by Trevor Nunn with a cast including Brian Cox, Sin�ad Cusack and Rufus Sewell. Looking a little like a rumpled, emeritus rock legend himself (though better preserved than most, despite pushing 69), the distinguished dramatist meets me in the caf� next door to the theatre to talk about a work that shuttles between Prague and Cambridge during the period from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the Velvet Revolution.

This is only the second play Stoppard has written about his country of origin, in a glittering career in which his star has ascended from the runaway 1967 success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his absurdist comedy set in the wings of Hamlet, to The Coast of Utopia, his massive 2002 trilogy following the fortunes of the group of exiled mid-19th-century Russian thinkers whose ideas sowed the seeds of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The earlier piece that turned its attention to Czechoslovakia was Professional Foul, a brilliant 1977 TV drama, full of cunningly interlocking ironies about the meaning of the title, in which a football-loving professor of philosophy, visiting Prague for a conference, had his moral horizons widened by the false incrimination and arrest of a former pupil. A Cambridge philosophy don and his Czech student are also central characters in Rock'n'Roll, but the new play carries an altogether more personal charge.

Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE began life as Tomas Straussler in 1937 in the town of Zlin. He was barely 18 months old when his family were forced to flee from the Nazis. The Strausslers took refuge in Singapore, only to be evacuated to India prior to the Japanese invasion. Tomas's father, a doctor, who had stayed behind to help, was killed when the Japanese bombed the ship on which he was fleeing. Tomas and his mother and brother were evacuated to India where she married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British Army, who brought them all to England in 1946. "I got here and I put on Englishness like a coat," Stoppard tells me. "It fitted me and it suited me." The playwright used to joke about being "a bounced Czech". Even after he had visited Prague and become a friend and active supporter of Vaclav Havel and the Charter 77 movement, Stoppard was still inclined to argue that far too much was made of "the Czech thing", pointing out that his education, which began India, had been entirely English. "I left before my memory kicked in," he says.

Latterly, though, there has been a lifting of the restraint on his recognising that, while English, he has never at some level stopped being Czech. "The whole process was vastly accelerated," he reveals, "when the country opened up and when my mother died in 1996. My mother was very anxious to put the past behind her and I honoured that. We never spoke Czech at home. She felt that my older brother and I would be handicapped if we were overt foreigners in this new life we were living".

Stoppard's work is fascinated by doppelgangers and double acts. One of the most moving things he's written is the scene in The Invention of Love (1997), where, in a dying dream, the older AE Housman, the great classical scholar and poet, encounters his unwitting younger self. Like two, lonely awkward people who have suddenly discovered a soulmate, the nervous, burningly intense undergraduate and the buttoned-up, passionately pedantic professor sit side-by-side on a bench enthusing one another. They are clearly one and the same person but, divided by an emotional cataclysm that is still-to-come for the younger man, they resemble jigsaw pieces that don't quite fit. Watching this superb episode, I remember thinking that the momentous upheavals of Stoppard's early life - banished from his place of birth by the Nazis and then exiled from it by the Communists - would make it possible for him to write a comparable drama in which the Stoppard who found security, tolerance and dizzying success in England came face to face with the self he might have been if had had to live under Communism in his native land.

It turns out, needless to say, that the playwright has beaten me to that idea. "I've often thought of writing an autobiography set in a parallel world in which I did go home to Czechoslovakia after the war. But I never started it. Jan [one of the main characters in Rock'n'Roll] is a vestigial gesture towards that". With dates that are almost the same as Stoppard's, and a wartime childhood in England, the anglophile Jan is like an imaginary alter ego. Dispatched back to Czechoslovakia in 1948, he returns to England in the 1960s to study philosophy at Cambridge with Max Morrow, a fiery, unrepentant Marxist who refuses to relinquish faith in the spirit of the Bolshevik revolution, despite the enormities that followed - including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that sends Jan, of his own accord, back to Prague.

Like Stoppard, Jan is a big rock fan. A crucial, if offstage, presence in the piece is the real-life psychedelic Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, who were persecuted by Gustav Husak's hardening regime and forced to go underground. Their eventual arrest and trial in 1976 became, to the government's astonishment, a cause c�l�bre, sparking the protest that led to Charter 77. Vaclav Havel famously emerged from the tragic farce in the courtroom declaring that "from now on, being careful seems so petty". One of the things that captivates Stoppard is the fact that The Plastic People "never set out to be symbols of resistance. In the West, bands love to be perceived as engaged and politically motivated and don't mind at all if the press writes about their protest rather than their music. But The Plastic People resented this. They wanted to be appreciated for their work".

It took a while, he says, for the writers, artists and surrealist playwrights, who were working at menial jobs because of their courageous dissent, to see the point of the Plastics, and vice versa. "The intellectuals thought the Plastic People were a bunch of long-haired layabouts who weren't engaged in what mattered, and the underground thought that the intellectuals were a kind of official opposition." What rattled the authorities was the band's refusal to play the game according to the regime's rules. The Plastic People threw away the board and the rulebook and, because of their superb indifference, were incorruptible.

"Ultimately, that's what Havel found attractive about them," Stoppard says. "Thanks to the band, intellectuals came to realise that 'living in truth' [Havel's famous maxim about the need to keep making authentic personal decisions in a repressive society] could take the form of attending a rock concert."

The play, says Stoppard, dramatises the internal disputes and spread of attitudes in the opposition (Jan has a friend, Ferda, who talks like Havel). Where on the spectrum, I wondered, does Stoppard think he would have stood? The real question, he replies, is what he would he have done about it - not whether he'd have been able to see the difference between justice and injustice, but whether he'd have had the courage to sign Charter 77. And that he'll never know.

Stoppard, famously reticent on the subject of his private life in interviews, has been married twice. His first marriage, to Jose Ingle, a nurse, in 1965, lasted seven years. In 1972, he married Miriam Moore-Robinson, now better known as Dr Miriam, the racy television medic and therapist. Their partnership lasted 20 years, until the playwright left her for the actress Felicity Kendal, who had been the leading lady of several of his plays, including his study of a playwright's infidelity, The Real Thing. They separated in 1998.

Stoppard has two sons from each marriage, although only one of the four, Ed, 31, has followed his father into the theatre; he recently played Hamlet in English Touring Theatre's production. The three other sons have branched out in diverse directions. Will is a manager in the music business; Barnaby is a director of commercials; and Oliver has a PhD and works as a postman.

In his Diaries, Peter Hall complains, after seeing one of Stoppard's works, that "it's about too many things, everything that is in Tom's head at the moment... somehow he has tried to make it into one play. It's four at least." At his best, though, Stoppard is a dramatist who can make wildly disparate-seeming subjects constellate in brilliant, mutually illuminating ways. In Arcadia (1993), chaos theory, changing fashions in landscape gardening, entropy, and a disputed point in the biography of Lord Byron are brought together by an intellectually playful and emotionally piercing story. So it's no surprise to learn that, alongside the pop and the politics, Rock'n'Roll will treat the audience to (among other things) arguments over the materialist theory of consciousness and analysis of the texts of the Lesbian Greek poet Sappho.

Stoppard is engagingly open about the other ways he'd once thought of giving these interests dramatic form. For* *example, his earlier plans for Sappho "had nothing to do with Rock'n'Roll. It was a structural thing. Her poems survive as fragments. There's one complete poem, and another that may be complete but looks a bit funny at the end. I'd always imagined these fragments were quite substantial but when I went to see the papyrus bits in the Sackler Library in Oxford, they looked like a box of cornflakes. What caught my eye is that a number of people have attempted to reassemble the poems and to guess what is missing. This is how it connects with Arcadia, where there's a guy in the present who is trying to reconstruct what happened in 1812 and, because the play shifts between the two periods, we can see where he's getting it wrong. So I thought: why not extend the principle and present the audience with 50 fragments of scenes and alternative versions of events to complete them."

It's a measure of Stoppard's ingenuity and adaptability that Sappho's poetry surfaces in Rock'n'Roll in a completely different guise, as part of an impassioned argument about the Marxist take on consciousness - that it's the social order that determines consciousness not the other (revolution-in-the-head) way round.

In 1976, Stoppard said: "I tend to overreact against the large claims of committed theatre, so-called, because it is an ill-afforded luxury for an artist to convince himself that he has effectively done his bit because he grapples with important problems. The effect of art is very long-term and each artist is only a tiny part of that effect". In the following year, he unveiled two of his most politically engaged works - Professional Foul on television and, in the theatre, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play with a live symphony orchestra and about two inmates in a Soviet mental asylum. But Stoppard continued to give no comfort to those who wished to recruit him into the ranks of the committed. His view that a play is important only if it's also good on grounds other than content and conviction was rammed home, to the point of snobbish overkill, in The Real Thing, in which the fastidious Stoppard-like dramatist-hero reacts with scornful outrage to the idea that he might help to polish the crude agit-prop drama written by a soldier who committed arson at the Cenotaph. You're left with the unfortunate impression that fierce left-wing dissent leads almost inevitably to bad writing.

Bill Gaskill, a former artistic director of the National Theatre, once declared that, while it is hard to define what a Royal Court play is, we all know what it isn't, and that's a play by Tom Stoppard. Gaskill had been engaged to direct a show for the Court's 50th anniversary season but stalked off in a huff at the programming of Rock'n'Roll. The offence he took was exacerbated, it seems, by the fact that the production would bring Trevor Nunn into the building. This position needs to be examined. It was once the fashion to complain that Stoppard played safe politically because (as the dramatist James Saunders put it) "he's basically a displaced person. Therefore he doesn't want to stick his neck out. He feels grateful to Britain, because he sees himself as a guest here and that makes it hard for him to criticise". But Rock'n'Roll, which is as much about England as Czechoslovakia, looks set to show anglophilia under some strain. To reverse Saunders' argument: it's precisely because of his refugee's love for English traditions of tolerance and self-respect that he's an acute observer of slipping standards, loss of nerve and a growing acceptance of curbs on liberty. To be "oppositional" (always a buzzword at the Court) is a function of perceptiveness, not of one's perceived ideological persuasion, and the current team are to be congratulated for recognising this in their welcome to Stoppard.

Another routine jibe against the dramatist is that he's all head and no heart. That may be true in a piece like Travesties (1974). But plays such as Arcadia and The Invention of Love have proved that he can marry cerebral high comedy and painful emotional depth, cleverness and wisdom.

In the latter, he pits Oscar Wilde, who threw away his life on a flamboyant infatuation with Lord Alfred Douglas, against AE Housman, whose unforgotten, unconsummated, passion for a sporty Oxford contemporary fed into the poetry of A Shropshire Lad and the passionate intensity of his textual criticism. One man is a symbol of abandon, the other of repression. Both produced lasting art. Who would you rather have been? "Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light," says Wilde, but the play, a beautiful study of the tension between different kinds of success and failure, makes it impossible to adjudicate.

I presented the author, in whom a Romantic struggles to stay, with a thought experiment. If somebody held a gun to Stoppard's head and said that the price of survival was assuming the existence of one or the other, how would he jump? "I would insist on adjusting the rules of your game. Instead of having to choose between the lives, let's say that you can choose between the circumstances and attributes of either Wilde or Housman and that you're then free to work with these as you may. In that case, I would choose Housman. I think my temperament veers more to stability than volatility, though I hope I would find a way of being happier for more of the time than Housman." But then he continues "On the other hand, I would rather have written The Importance of Being Earnest, so the question can't be resolved".

Stoppard's eyes sparkle with amusement when tells me of a string of spooky coincidences associated with his plays. "Fermat's last theorem was proved when we were in preview for Arcadia [in which the mathematically inspired 13-year-old heroine is it preoccupied by it]. In The Invention of Love, the two Housmans discuss a poem by the Roman elegist Gallus, of which only one line survives. Nine more lines turned up while we were doing it." And now, while rehearsing Rock'n'Roll, a researcher in Cologne has found a fragment that matches up with an extant piece of a Sappho poem. Who says that art can't have a short-term effect? I suggest that Stoppard, the Oscar-winning co-author of Shakespeare in Love, should next try to extend the Bard's canon by writing a show involving the lost collaborative play Cardenio. Even a scrap of that would be a momentous turn-up for the books. "No," he responds with a shaft of vintage Stoppard wit, "I think it might be more useful to devise a play about a cure for the common cold."

'Rock'n'Roll', Royal Court, London SW1 (020-7565 5000) 14 June to 15 July; transfers to the Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2 (0870 060 6623) on 22 July

Rock'n'roll really is a driving force in Rock'n'Roll, the new Tom Stoppard play that opens next week at the Royal Court in a production directed by Trevor Nunn with a cast including Brian Cox, Sin�ad Cusack and Rufus Sewell. Looking a little like a rumpled, emeritus rock legend himself (though better preserved than most, despite pushing 69), the distinguished dramatist meets me in the caf� next door to the theatre to talk about a work that shuttles between Prague and Cambridge during the period from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the Velvet Revolution.

This is only the second play Stoppard has written about his country of origin, in a glittering career in which his star has ascended from the runaway 1967 success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his absurdist comedy set in the wings of Hamlet, to The Coast of Utopia, his massive 2002 trilogy following the fortunes of the group of exiled mid-19th-century Russian thinkers whose ideas sowed the seeds of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The earlier piece that turned its attention to Czechoslovakia was Professional Foul, a brilliant 1977 TV drama, full of cunningly interlocking ironies about the meaning of the title, in which a football-loving professor of philosophy, visiting Prague for a conference, had his moral horizons widened by the false incrimination and arrest of a former pupil. A Cambridge philosophy don and his Czech student are also central characters in Rock'n'Roll, but the new play carries an altogether more personal charge.

Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE began life as Tomas Straussler in 1937 in the town of Zlin. He was barely 18 months old when his family were forced to flee from the Nazis. The Strausslers took refuge in Singapore, only to be evacuated to India prior to the Japanese invasion. Tomas's father, a doctor, who had stayed behind to help, was killed when the Japanese bombed the ship on which he was fleeing. Tomas and his mother and brother were evacuated to India where she married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British Army, who brought them all to England in 1946. "I got here and I put on Englishness like a coat," Stoppard tells me. "It fitted me and it suited me." The playwright used to joke about being "a bounced Czech". Even after he had visited Prague and become a friend and active supporter of Vaclav Havel and the Charter 77 movement, Stoppard was still inclined to argue that far too much was made of "the Czech thing", pointing out that his education, which began India, had been entirely English. "I left before my memory kicked in," he says.

Latterly, though, there has been a lifting of the restraint on his recognising that, while English, he has never at some level stopped being Czech. "The whole process was vastly accelerated," he reveals, "when the country opened up and when my mother died in 1996. My mother was very anxious to put the past behind her and I honoured that. We never spoke Czech at home. She felt that my older brother and I would be handicapped if we were overt foreigners in this new life we were living".

Stoppard's work is fascinated by doppelgangers and double acts. One of the most moving things he's written is the scene in The Invention of Love (1997), where, in a dying dream, the older AE Housman, the great classical scholar and poet, encounters his unwitting younger self. Like two, lonely awkward people who have suddenly discovered a soulmate, the nervous, burningly intense undergraduate and the buttoned-up, passionately pedantic professor sit side-by-side on a bench enthusing one another. They are clearly one and the same person but, divided by an emotional cataclysm that is still-to-come for the younger man, they resemble jigsaw pieces that don't quite fit. Watching this superb episode, I remember thinking that the momentous upheavals of Stoppard's early life - banished from his place of birth by the Nazis and then exiled from it by the Communists - would make it possible for him to write a comparable drama in which the Stoppard who found security, tolerance and dizzying success in England came face to face with the self he might have been if had had to live under Communism in his native land.

It turns out, needless to say, that the playwright has beaten me to that idea. "I've often thought of writing an autobiography set in a parallel world in which I did go home to Czechoslovakia after the war. But I never started it. Jan [one of the main characters in Rock'n'Roll] is a vestigial gesture towards that". With dates that are almost the same as Stoppard's, and a wartime childhood in England, the anglophile Jan is like an imaginary alter ego. Dispatched back to Czechoslovakia in 1948, he returns to England in the 1960s to study philosophy at Cambridge with Max Morrow, a fiery, unrepentant Marxist who refuses to relinquish faith in the spirit of the Bolshevik revolution, despite the enormities that followed - including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that sends Jan, of his own accord, back to Prague.

Like Stoppard, Jan is a big rock fan. A crucial, if offstage, presence in the piece is the real-life psychedelic Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, who were persecuted by Gustav Husak's hardening regime and forced to go underground. Their eventual arrest and trial in 1976 became, to the government's astonishment, a cause c�l�bre, sparking the protest that led to Charter 77. Vaclav Havel famously emerged from the tragic farce in the courtroom declaring that "from now on, being careful seems so petty". One of the things that captivates Stoppard is the fact that The Plastic People "never set out to be symbols of resistance. In the West, bands love to be perceived as engaged and politically motivated and don't mind at all if the press writes about their protest rather than their music. But The Plastic People resented this. They wanted to be appreciated for their work".

It took a while, he says, for the writers, artists and surrealist playwrights, who were working at menial jobs because of their courageous dissent, to see the point of the Plastics, and vice versa. "The intellectuals thought the Plastic People were a bunch of long-haired layabouts who weren't engaged in what mattered, and the underground thought that the intellectuals were a kind of official opposition." What rattled the authorities was the band's refusal to play the game according to the regime's rules. The Plastic People threw away the board and the rulebook and, because of their superb indifference, were incorruptible.

"Ultimately, that's what Havel found attractive about them," Stoppard says. "Thanks to the band, intellectuals came to realise that 'living in truth' [Havel's famous maxim about the need to keep making authentic personal decisions in a repressive society] could take the form of attending a rock concert."

The play, says Stoppard, dramatises the internal disputes and spread of attitudes in the opposition (Jan has a friend, Ferda, who talks like Havel). Where on the spectrum, I wondered, does Stoppard think he would have stood? The real question, he replies, is what he would he have done about it - not whether he'd have been able to see the difference between justice and injustice, but whether he'd have had the courage to sign Charter 77. And that he'll never know.

Stoppard, famously reticent on the subject of his private life in interviews, has been married twice. His first marriage, to Jose Ingle, a nurse, in 1965, lasted seven years. In 1972, he married Miriam Moore-Robinson, now better known as Dr Miriam, the racy television medic and therapist. Their partnership lasted 20 years, until the playwright left her for the actress Felicity Kendal, who had been the leading lady of several of his plays, including his study of a playwright's infidelity, The Real Thing. They separated in 1998.

Stoppard has two sons from each marriage, although only one of the four, Ed, 31, has followed his father into the theatre; he recently played Hamlet in English Touring Theatre's production. The three other sons have branched out in diverse directions. Will is a manager in the music business; Barnaby is a director of commercials; and Oliver has a PhD and works as a postman.

In his Diaries, Peter Hall complains, after seeing one of Stoppard's works, that "it's about too many things, everything that is in Tom's head at the moment... somehow he has tried to make it into one play. It's four at least." At his best, though, Stoppard is a dramatist who can make wildly disparate-seeming subjects constellate in brilliant, mutually illuminating ways. In Arcadia (1993), chaos theory, changing fashions in landscape gardening, entropy, and a disputed point in the biography of Lord Byron are brought together by an intellectually playful and emotionally piercing story. So it's no surprise to learn that, alongside the pop and the politics, Rock'n'Roll will treat the audience to (among other things) arguments over the materialist theory of consciousness and analysis of the texts of the Lesbian Greek poet Sappho.

Stoppard is engagingly open about the other ways he'd once thought of giving these interests dramatic form. For* *example, his earlier plans for Sappho "had nothing to do with Rock'n'Roll. It was a structural thing. Her poems survive as fragments. There's one complete poem, and another that may be complete but looks a bit funny at the end. I'd always imagined these fragments were quite substantial but when I went to see the papyrus bits in the Sackler Library in Oxford, they looked like a box of cornflakes. What caught my eye is that a number of people have attempted to reassemble the poems and to guess what is missing. This is how it connects with Arcadia, where there's a guy in the present who is trying to reconstruct what happened in 1812 and, because the play shifts between the two periods, we can see where he's getting it wrong. So I thought: why not extend the principle and present the audience with 50 fragments of scenes and alternative versions of events to complete them."

It's a measure of Stoppard's ingenuity and adaptability that Sappho's poetry surfaces in Rock'n'Roll in a completely different guise, as part of an impassioned argument about the Marxist take on consciousness - that it's the social order that determines consciousness not the other (revolution-in-the-head) way round.

In 1976, Stoppard said: "I tend to overreact against the large claims of committed theatre, so-called, because it is an ill-afforded luxury for an artist to convince himself that he has effectively done his bit because he grapples with important problems. The effect of art is very long-term and each artist is only a tiny part of that effect". In the following year, he unveiled two of his most politically engaged works - Professional Foul on television and, in the theatre, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play with a live symphony orchestra and about two inmates in a Soviet mental asylum. But Stoppard continued to give no comfort to those who wished to recruit him into the ranks of the committed. His view that a play is important only if it's also good on grounds other than content and conviction was rammed home, to the point of snobbish overkill, in The Real Thing, in which the fastidious Stoppard-like dramatist-hero reacts with scornful outrage to the idea that he might help to polish the crude agit-prop drama written by a soldier who committed arson at the Cenotaph. You're left with the unfortunate impression that fierce left-wing dissent leads almost inevitably to bad writing.

Bill Gaskill, a former artistic director of the National Theatre, once declared that, while it is hard to define what a Royal Court play is, we all know what it isn't, and that's a play by Tom Stoppard. Gaskill had been engaged to direct a show for the Court's 50th anniversary season but stalked off in a huff at the programming of Rock'n'Roll. The offence he took was exacerbated, it seems, by the fact that the production would bring Trevor Nunn into the building. This position needs to be examined. It was once the fashion to complain that Stoppard played safe politically because (as the dramatist James Saunders put it) "he's basically a displaced person. Therefore he doesn't want to stick his neck out. He feels grateful to Britain, because he sees himself as a guest here and that makes it hard for him to criticise". But Rock'n'Roll, which is as much about England as Czechoslovakia, looks set to show anglophilia under some strain. To reverse Saunders' argument: it's precisely because of his refugee's love for English traditions of tolerance and self-respect that he's an acute observer of slipping standards, loss of nerve and a growing acceptance of curbs on liberty. To be "oppositional" (always a buzzword at the Court) is a function of perceptiveness, not of one's perceived ideological persuasion, and the current team are to be congratulated for recognising this in their welcome to Stoppard.

Another routine jibe against the dramatist is that he's all head and no heart. That may be true in a piece like Travesties (1974). But plays such as Arcadia and The Invention of Love have proved that he can marry cerebral high comedy and painful emotional depth, cleverness and wisdom.

In the latter, he pits Oscar Wilde, who threw away his life on a flamboyant infatuation with Lord Alfred Douglas, against AE Housman, whose unforgotten, unconsummated, passion for a sporty Oxford contemporary fed into the poetry of A Shropshire Lad and the passionate intensity of his textual criticism. One man is a symbol of abandon, the other of repression. Both produced lasting art. Who would you rather have been? "Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light," says Wilde, but the play, a beautiful study of the tension between different kinds of success and failure, makes it impossible to adjudicate.

I presented the author, in whom a Romantic struggles to stay, with a thought experiment. If somebody held a gun to Stoppard's head and said that the price of survival was assuming the existence of one or the other, how would he jump? "I would insist on adjusting the rules of your game. Instead of having to choose between the lives, let's say that you can choose between the circumstances and attributes of either Wilde or Housman and that you're then free to work with these as you may. In that case, I would choose Housman. I think my temperament veers more to stability than volatility, though I hope I would find a way of being happier for more of the time than Housman." But then he continues "On the other hand, I would rather have written The Importance of Being Earnest, so the question can't be resolved".

Stoppard's eyes sparkle with amusement when tells me of a string of spooky coincidences associated with his plays. "Fermat's last theorem was proved when we were in preview for Arcadia [in which the mathematically inspired 13-year-old heroine is it preoccupied by it]. In The Invention of Love, the two Housmans discuss a poem by the Roman elegist Gallus, of which only one line survives. Nine more lines turned up while we were doing it." And now, while rehearsing Rock'n'Roll, a researcher in Cologne has found a fragment that matches up with an extant piece of a Sappho poem. Who says that art can't have a short-term effect? I suggest that Stoppard, the Oscar-winning co-author of Shakespeare in Love, should next try to extend the Bard's canon by writing a show involving the lost collaborative play Cardenio. Even a scrap of that would be a momentous turn-up for the books. "No," he responds with a shaft of vintage Stoppard wit, "I think it might be more useful to devise a play about a cure for the common cold."

'Rock'n'Roll', Royal Court, London SW1 (020-7565 5000) 14 June to 15 July; transfers to the Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2 (0870 060 6623) on 22 July

Revolution in the head

Tom Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a baby. Now, 68 years later, he has written Rock'n'Roll - a brilliant exploration of liberty, rebellion and identity that captures the spirit of the Sixties, from the Prague underground to the fragile genius of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett

Neal Ascherson
Sunday June 4, 2006
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1789745,00.html

English, but has never stopped being Czech ... Tom Stoppard in 1967.
Photograph: Jane Bown

'At last he's written a play about Czechoslovakia!' So they say, in a tone which, perhaps unconsciously, has smug and patronising notes. The implication, both nasty and ridiculous, is that Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler in the town of Zlin, has finally acknowledged that he isn't really English, has ended a long pretence which never convinced anyone, has faced up to foreignness.

But is Czechoslovakia - that country which no longer exists - really the place Stoppard is writing about? It's true that Rock 'n' Roll, which began previews at the Royal Court yesterday, is partly set in Prague, between the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It's true that Stoppard, who came to know Vaclav Havel and many other persecuted figures in that miserable period, has dramatised the conflicts and dilemmas of the underground Czech opposition with a rare empathy. And yet, after reading it, I felt that, in the end, this was a play about England.

To meet me, Tom Stoppard came out of a rehearsal room in Soho. Through the door I glimpsed Trevor Nunn gesticulating to a cast which includes Brian Cox and Sinead Cusack. How, I wondered, was Nunn coping with Stoppard's stage instructions for 'smash cuts' - changes of lighting and scene which have to be instantaneous rather than faded? Even for a master-director, this must be a devilishly intricate play.

We found an empty, bare-boarded room to talk in. A big rumpled man, Stoppard looked tired until he began to speak. His dark eyes sparkled. He pulled out a gadgety pocket ashtray, and contentedly lit up.

Stoppard left Czechoslovakia in 1938, when he was still a baby. He has no memory of his birthplace and does not speak Czech. His father was killed in the Far East in 1941, after the Japanese conquest of Singapore, and his mother brought the children up to feel themselves proudly English. This is the landscape, the culture, the tolerant old society in which he feels at home, and which he intensely - sometimes anxiously - loves. A fastidious man with terms, he doesn't go on about 'Britain'. It is England, with its very special ways and references, which he is writing about.

He has said that he is 'English now' but that at some level he has never stopped also being Czech. His mother's death a few years ago may have subtly freed Stoppard to explore himself for traces of his origins. But no sudden self-discovery led to this play. It seems to have been prompted by reflecting on his friend Vaclav Havel's moral and philosophical writings, and by reading about the background to the Czech 'Chartist' dissidents in the 1970s.

One of the central figures in the play is Jan, a man of Stoppard's age who also spent a wartime childhood in England but who was taken back to Czechoslovakia in 1948. Jan comes to Cambridge in the 1960s as a student but in 1968, when the Warsaw Pact armies invade to overthrow the 'Prague spring' and Alexander Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face', he returns to his country. Stoppard said to me: 'Jan is a sort of shadow life of my own life. If I had gone back in 1948 and stayed, what would my life have been?'

There is a resemblance here to Michael Frayn's play Democracy. Frayn's story of Willy Brandt and Gunter Guillaume, the East German spy in Brandt's inmost circle, becomes a drama about two men who both had the opportunity to lead quite different lives, and who both wonder: 'What would my life have been if ...?' And yet Stoppard and Frayn are utterly different writers. Frayn's drama is spare and hard-edged, even Greek in its sense of necessity driving on people who long to behave well to behave shamefully. With Stoppard, all kinds of political or philosophical ideas, and regions of learning which at first seem unrelated to the play's outline - in Rock 'n' Roll it's the texts of Sappho or materialist theories of brain function, in his dazzling Arcadia (1993) it was chaos theory - somehow pour together into a compost out of which unforgettable characters grow.

The other setting of Rock 'n' Roll is intellectual Cambridge, home of Professor Max Morrow and his family. Max is a hot-hearted, unrepentant veteran communist, 'the last white rhino' (as he describes himself) who refuses to abandon his faith in the Bolshevik Revolution as the Soviet Union and its Czechoslovak henchmen commit one crime after another. His quarrels with everyone around - with the Dubcek supporter Jan, with a young Eurocommunist, with the Czech intellectual Lenka who believes in the blissful 1968 revolution of the imagination - are monumental.

In the Cambridge garden they are all free to brandish their competing utopias. In Prague, Jan and his friends go to prison for seeking the freedom they have lost. And yet Stoppard makes no easy contrasts. Something is being lost in his beloved England too.

His previous work was the trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), three plays about Russian political exiles in 19th-century London. In it he makes the revolutionary liberal Alexander Herzen praise the English, the people who invented liberty and didn't decorate it with theories. 'Their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence, which is the reason England is the home to every shade of political exile. They don't give us asylum out of respect for the asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves.'

That is the England Stoppard feels he grew up in. But now? In this play the Czech woman Lenka - speaking in Max's house in 1990 when democracy has triumphed in her own country - bitterly warns Jan not to think of returning to Cambridge. 'They put something in the water since you were here.' The English, she says, have become obedient, apologetic about everything, frightened to use their minds.

I asked Stoppard about the difference between those two speeches. Had he changed his mind about England? He thought, and gave an oblique, disturbing answer. 'I went to Belarus last August,' he said, 'and I met a documentary film-maker who had been beaten up. We talked about freedom, and he said that the fact that we were a free country was a compliment to the people, not to the government. That Lenka speech? I feel, to be honest, that we - if I can say "we", you know what I mean - are better than what's going on now.'

What was it that was 'going on now'? 'When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now. And those restraints, all that, would have been completely unacceptable, unthinkable, when I was young.'

Cautiously, as he talked on, he began to draw the Czech and English wings of his new play together. 'When I was young [a phrase he uses a lot now, and not always with nostalgia] I was very condescending to East Europe and East Europeans because they seemed to be unembarrassed by what had happened to them. And they seemed to have no sense of what they had given up, of how gullible they had become.'

He repeated an anecdote in the play ('actually, I got it from Mandelshtam; it's Russian') about Czech schoolchildren who simply couldn't grasp the notion that in some countries people were allowed to live wherever they liked. 'When I read that, I felt that the real evil out there was that they had persuaded an entire population that such restraint on freedom is normal. Thirty years ago I had a somewhat patronising attitude to cruel, grotesque humour, things like airbrushing Trotsky out of photographs. The fact that people could go along with that made me feel quite superior. But now, 30 years on, I feel we are halfway there.'

For all Stoppard's anxiety and his distrust of utopian faiths, he seems to keep a belief in the goodness and generosity of ordinary people when they are left to themselves. Even if, as Lenka says, 'they' (governments, establishments) have put something in the water, the English remain deep down the same nation Herzen loved for their tolerance and self-respect. I quoted to him a strange remark made by the real Alexander Herzen: 'Peoples are not either totally good or thoroughly bad. Peoples are true; a people that is a lie does not exist.' He liked it. But was it really valid? Were the Czech people 'true', or could decades of bullying and humiliation turn it into a lie?

A few Czech intellectuals have feared such a thing could happen. We talked about the novelist Milan Kundera's notorious 'Finis Bohemiae' article, written in the 1970s when he was an exile in France. It suggested that, after the Soviet invasion, the whole experiment of creating an independent Czech nation and culture might have to be considered a failure. In a century's time, the language spoken in Prague could well be Russian. I remember listening, in that city, to the fury of other Czech writers at Kundera's 'loss of nerve'. Harassed and spied upon, they were still turning out novels and plays 'for the drawer' or for smuggling abroad. How dare Kundera hint that Czech culture was extinct?

And yet, perhaps, there are two sorts of national culture in Europe. There are those who can imagine their own extinction - a region once called the Czech lands where 100 years ago people spoke and wrote a language which can now only be understood with a dictionary. That was Kundera's nightmare, which also haunted the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. And then there are others - France, Britain, Poland, for instance - for whom the idea that the French, English or Polish languages are mortal is too absurd to be imaginable.

And is there really anything 'true' and indestructible in 'national character'? When I visit the Czech Republic these days I keep meeting Czechs who complain that communism has permanently deformed the nation, leaving indelible habits of cheating, selfishness, corruption and greed. I put this to Stoppard. As he often does in argument, he quoted his friend. 'Havel said that to live in such a system turns people surly, out of joint. That sense of a national character being altered is true. And yet I am optimistic.'

Rock 'n' Roll is a subtle, complex play about ways to resist 'systems' and preserve what is human. At its core is a succession of arguments between two Czech friends, Jan (who holds some of Kundera's attitudes) and Ferda (who more clearly represents Havel, and borrows lines from some of Havel's famous utterances). Jan, forced to work as a kitchen porter, at first despises Ferda's petitions against arrests and censorship as the self-indulgence of an intellectual clique. A devout rock enthusiast, he sees the persecuted rock band the Plastic People of the Universe (who actually existed) as the essence of freedom because they simply don't care about anything but the music. They baffle the thought police because 'they're not heretics. They're pagans'.

Ferda at first dismisses the Plastic People as long-haired escapists who have nothing to do with the real struggle. But later, when they are arrested and imprisoned after an absurd trial, he comes to understand that the heretics and the pagans are inseparable allies.

Leaving the band's real-life trial, Havel famously said that 'from now on, being careful seems so petty'. Soon afterwards a few hundred brave men and women signed 'Charter 77', the declaration of rights and liberties which earned them prison sentences and suffocating surveillance but which was read around the world.

Stoppard is fascinated by the Plastic People, by the idea that the most devastating response to tyranny might be the simple wish to be left alone. In Prague he met and talked to Ivan Jirous, their founder, whose long hair enraged the authorities. 'I always loved rock'n'roll,' Stoppard says. 'And what was so intriguing about the Plastic People was that they never set out to be symbols of resistance, although the outside world thought of them that way. They said: "People never write about our music!" In the West, rock bands liked to be thought of for their protest, rather than their music. But Jirous didn't try to turn the Plastic People into anything; he just saw that they were saying, "We don't care, leave us alone!" Jirous insisted that they were actually better off than musicians in the West because there was no seduction going on. There was nothing the regime wanted from them, and nothing they wanted from the regime.'

There is dissent which wants to substitute one system for another. And there is dissent which simply says: Get off our back, scrap all the guidelines and controls, and humanity will reassert itself.

Patiently, Stoppard explained to me how historic disputes between Kundera and Havel were reflected in the play. Kundera, in the first confused year after the invasion, had hoped that the experiment could still continue, working out a society in which uncensored freedom could co-exist with a socialist state, a new form of socialism which still needed to be devised. 'Havel said that it wasn't a question of making new systems. "Constructing" a free press was like inventing the wheel. You don't have to invent a free society because such a society is the norm - it's normal.'

I asked if this notion of freedom as 'normal' and 'natural', something which doesn't need designing, wasn't close to the anarchist vision But this was not what he meant, it seemed. Stoppard's trust that 'people' will behave well when left on their own has its common-sense limits. In Salvage, the third play in the Utopia triliogy, Stoppard makes Herzen puncture the exuberant anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in a needle-sharp exchange:

Bakunin: 'Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.'

Herzen: 'Is that the same people or different people?'

Rock'n'Roll is, naturally enough, full of talk about rock music, about Jan's precious albums brought from England and smashed by the secret police, about memories of mighty bands of the 1970s. But the play has one extra character who never comes on stage, yet haunts the imagination of the other characters. This is Syd Barrett, once the marvellous young leader and songwriter of Pink Floyd, who was dumped by the band for being unmanageable, went back to his mother's semi in Cambridge, and fell silent. Today an elderly balding man whom nobody recognises, he lives as a recluse. It's not clear if he knows that someone has written a play about him.

I asked Stoppard why he used Syd. 'I wanted to write about somebody who had simply "got off the train". A friend lent me some books about him. Those deceptively simple songs! Some said he was a genius, others that there was nothing in them ...'

But it's about more than the songs. It's about other things which are prowling through the play behind its philosophical sparkle: beauty, death, transience. Stoppard says: 'I found the pictures in those books very moving. There's a photograph of him like a dark archangel.'

Syd, in Rock'n'Roll, is made into the shadow of the lost god Pan. One woman, bewitched by him a quarter-century ago, remembers him as 'the guarantee of beauty'. But Tom Stoppard's play is saying that in politics, in families, in physical existence, there are no guarantees.

� Rock 'n' Roll is at the Royal Court Theatre, London SW1 until 15 July, then transfers to the Duke of York's in the West End from 22 July to 24 September

Chequered history

October 1918 Republic of Czechoslovakia proclaimed in the aftermath of WW1.

1939-45 Czechoslovakia ceases to exist, becomes German protectorate with Slovakia as an independent state, until Soviet occupation and end of WW2.

1946 Communist party (CPCz) leader Klement Gottwald elected as prime minister.

1948 Communists gain majority in government; Gottwald becomes President and imposes Stalinist rule.

1968 President Alexander Dubcek introduces programme of reforms known as 'Prague Spring', prompting invasion by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops.

1969 Student Jan Palach burns himself to death in a protest against occupation.

1975 Author Milan Kundera flees to France, having been blacklisted, his books banned, after criticising the Soviets.

1976 Rock group the Plastic People of the Universe arrested. Playwright Vaclav Havel attends their trial.

1977 Dissidents including Havel publish Charter 77 calling for civil and political rights to be restored.

1989 Havel elected President, completing the 'velvet revolution'.

1 January 1993 Czechoslovakia splits peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, completing the 'velvet divorce'.

Tom Stoppard's New Rock 'N' Roll Begins at the Royal Court June 3

By Robert Simonson
03 Jun 2006
stoppard.jpg (38933 bytes)

Tom Stoppard
photo by Aubrey Reuben

Rock ‘N’ Roll, Tom Stoppard’s latest play and the dramatist’s first for the Royal Court, begins performances June 3. Rufus Sewell co-stars with Brian Cox and Sinead Cusack under the direction of Trevor Nunn.

Rock ‘N’ Roll spans the period from Czechoslovakia’s Prague spring of 1968 to the then-communist country’s Velvet Revolution of 1989. The play has an official opening night on June 14. The run finishes July 15.

One of the highlights of the Royal Court’s 50th Anniversary Season, Rock ‘N’ Roll marks Stoppard and Nunn’s debuts at the theatre.

Sewell’s theatrical credits include Osborne’s Luther and Stoppard’s Arcadia, both for the National Theatre, a West End production of Macbeth and Rat in the Skull at the Royal Court.

Cusack’s stage work includes LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, the title role in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth for the RSC and Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind for the Donmar.

Cox’s Royal Court appearances include In Celebration, Cromwell, Rat in the Skull and, most recently, McPherson’s Dublin Carol in 2000. He’s also well known for such films as “Match Point,” "Troy,” “X-Men” and “The Bourne Supremacy.”

For more on Rock ‘N’ Roll call (0)207 565 5000.

I saw the preview of "Rock 'n' Roll" tonight! It was great and it got better as it went along. The audience loved it, they would have gotten a standing ovation had it not been for the fact that they didn't raise the curtain after it went down.
The second half especially felt like the production really came together. In between scenes, there are rock songs playing and the titles are projected on a big screen and sometimes the wait took a bit long which takes some of the pace out of the play, especially in the first half. Rufus goes through some transformations as the play spans several decades. He ends up with grey slicked back hair and it actually looks very, very cool. I won't say anything about the plot and the characters as I don't want to spoil it for anyone going. The play text won't actually go on sale until the press night on June 14. But I can happily report that it's very long! Yay!

Thanks, Uke!!

Following it's debut at The Royal Court Theatre, June 3 to July 15, Rock 'n' Roll will transfer to The Duke of York's Theatre in the West End.

Duke of York's
Box Office: 0870 060 6623
Genre: Play Subgenre: Drama
Age suitability: General

Tom Stoppard's new play views 1968-1990 from the perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band symbolises the resistance to the Communist regime, and Cambridge, where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher.

Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack and Rufus Sewell lead the cast which is directed by Sir Trevor Nunn.

Author: Tom Stoppard; Director: Trevor Nunn; Producer: Sonia Friedman Productions, Tulbart Productions, Michael Linnit for National Angels Ltd and Boyett Ostar Productions; Set designer: Robert Jones; Lighting Designer: Howard Harrison; Costume Designer: Emma Ryott; Sound: Ian Dickson;
Cast includes: Nicole Ansari, Louise Bangay, Anthony Calf, Martin Chamberlian, Miranda Colchester, Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack, Alice Eve, Edward Hogg, Rufus Sewell, Peter Sullivan

Opening night: 22 July 2006
Booking until: 24 September 2006
Times: Tue-Sat 19:30, Mats Wed, Sat & Sun 15:00
Prices: �10-�45

December 13, 2005
Rufus will begin work on Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll" in April, 2006. The new play will be directed by Trevor Nunn at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

British actor RUFUS SEWELL is to take the lead role in Oscar-winning writer TOM STOPPARD's new play ROCK AND ROLL.

The 38-year-old LEGEND OF ZORRO actor will star as a young man caught between political and cultural upheavals in Czechoslovakia and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s - a storyline which is considered the Czech-born playwright's most autobiographical work to date.

Directed by TREVOR NUNN, the play is set to open at London's Royal Court next June (06), and is predicted to transfer immediately to a West End Theatre.
Thanks, Rai!

London Theatre Guide
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Box Office: 020 7565 5000
Genre: Play

Tom Stoppard's first play for the Royal Court takes a look at Czechoslovakia's recent history - spanning the period between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution - from two different perspectives. In Prague, a rock 'n' roll band symbolises the resistance to the regime, while in England a Communist philosopher at Cambridge represents the British left.

Stoppard's many plays include the Olivier Award-winning Arcadia, Rosencratz And Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, The Real Thing and The Coast Of Utopia.

Rock 'n' Roll is directed by Trevor Nunn, who is also making his Royal Court debut. Dubbed 'the people's director', Nunn's recent credits include Richard II and Hamlet, both at the Old Vic, while other West End shows that have benefited from Nunn's guidance include Anything Goes, Les Mis�rables and The Woman In White.

Author: Tom Stoppard; Director: Trevor Nunn; Producer: The Royal Court;

Previews from: 3 June 2006
Opening night: 14 June 2006
Closing: 15 July 2006
Times: Mon-Sat 19:30 (14 Jun 19:00), Mats Sat (except 3 Jun) 15:30
Prices: �7.50-�25

Theatre information:
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Address: Sloane Square, London, SW1W 8AS

Thanks for the link, Uke!

Variety.com
V legit
October 16, 2005
Court convenes 50th
Royal playhouse marks its half-century looking back to Osborne's 'Anger'

By MATT WOLF

LONDON -- As the Royal Court prepares to mark its half-century next year, the playhouse that gave us John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" in 1956 is anticipating a lineup of work in the same tradition of adventurous, socially engaged drama with, occasionally, the power to scorch.

Will any of the new season's productions be instant classics along the lines of the Osborne landmark? Who's to tell, especially since some of the plays (a new David HareDavid Hare script, for instance) aren't even written yet. But the plan is for a furiously busy Court season, with more than 20 productions and 50 readings -- one for every year in the Court's history.

The coup for 2006 -- a season whose �1 million ($1.75 million) budget is some 2� times the theater's annual standard -- is the first contribution from Tom Stoppard, with his latest play, "Rock 'n' Roll," which opens a six-week run in early June. Trevor Nunn and Bunny Christie are the director/designer team.

"My job is to find big defining plays, and I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't pester people like Tom, which I did gently but sustainedly," says Court artistic director Ian Rickson. "Rock 'n' Roll," with speaking roles for up to 20 actors, is said to shift in time from 1968 to the present. Music from the period helps chart an intricate narrative that moves over the years between Czechoslovakia -- the country of Stoppard's birth -- and England.

Not all Court newcomers are as established as Stoppard, but they form part of the theater's typically varied, eclectic mix. Tanika Gupta, the 42-year-old Asian writer (her parents are from Calcutta), told Variety she could have only preemed her latest show, "Sugar Mummies," at the Court.

"Mummies" is a nine-person play focusing on the sex industry in the Caribbean, and the women -- a diverse quartet in Gupta's play -- who travel to Jamaica in search of carnal adventure and maybe even love.

. "With 'Sugar Mummies,' I was very much writing a play for the Court rather than a play you fancy writing and then tout around," Gupta says.

Sexually explicit, per Gupta, and hopefully honest, the play, due to start a monthlong run next July, is intended for a public that doesn't mind something different. "You don't have to worry about the audience being prissy," she says.

And how could they, given Court dramatists have written of the stoning of a baby (Edward Bond's "Saved""Saved"), mutilation and torture (Sarah Kane's "Blasted") and, most recently, compulsive gay cruising on the Net (Tim Fountain's "Sex Addict"). The Court can embrace calmer terrain, too -- think of Court regular Conor McPherson, for starters -- but even there the emphasis is on a distinctive voice. And a bit of daring.Occasionally, the title provides a clue. In April, Simon Stephens, a veteran of the Court's tiny Theater Upstairs, makes his mainstage debut with a new play, "Motortown," which originally went by the title, "Fuck Off." Play, about a young British soldier returning home from Iraq to east London's Essex, directly acknowledges the tradition of which it is a part.

"I've written a play, I think, that's pretty angry: the least personal, most political play I've ever written," says Stephens. "And I couldn't have done it without the support of this theater."

Not every Court play exists to vent its spleen, any more than Osborne's kitchen-sink realism has been an unshakable Court template. (On the other hand, one can trace a direct connection between Osborne and such Court inheritors as Edward Bond, Howard Barker, and even Caryl Churchill, who in varying ways are themselves fueled by rage.)

What matters, says former Court a.d.a.d. Stephen DaldryStephen Daldry, is that the playhouse allows "an extraordinary cacophony of different sights and sounds and voices." Daldry is keeping his fall calendar clear to direct Hare's new play and has shepherded three of Churchill's more audacious works -- "This Is a Chair," "Far Away" and "A Number" -- to Court preems.

In the absence of a new play from Churchill, at least for now, the writer described by Rickson as Britain's "most adventurous" will be repped by a February revival of "Top Girls"; Rickson himself directs the six-week run of a seminal work from the Court's most prolific dramatist. But the programming allows established writers to rub up against new ones, less-seasoned scribes to follow pros.

To that end, Gupta's "Sugar Mummies" will fall between new plays from Stoppardand Terry Johnson ("Piano/Forte"), a Court regular. Johnson's latest stars Kelly Reilly and American thesp Alicia WittAlicia Witt as sisters. Daringly for Johnson, it's not about anyone famous.

"Our task," says Rickson, who is entering his final year as Court a.d., "is to commemorate and celebrate while being true to ourselves.""Look Back in Anger" gets a special reading, starring David Tennant and Kelly Reilly, on May 8, while 2005 Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter will star later in the season in onetime Court writer Samuel Beckett's solo play, "Krapp's Last Tape."

But the desire is for a year that also looks ahead. Or as Rickson puts it, "How do we keep the story moving forward?"

JERWOOD THEATRE DOWNSTAIRS
RoyalCourtTheatre.com

ROCK 'N' ROLL
Written by Tom Stoppard
3 June - 15 July

Direction: Trevor Nunn
Tom Stoppard provocative new play is his first for the Royal Court. ROCK 'N' ROLL spans the recent history of Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution - but from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band came to symbolise resistance to the regime, and the British left, represented by a Communist philosopher at Cambridge.

Recent work by Tom Stoppard includes THE COAST OF UTOPIA, THE INVENTION OF LOVE, ARCADIA, HAPGOOD (Aldwych Theatre), THE REAL THING (Strand Theatre), NIGHT AND DAY, TRAVESTIES (RSC), JUMPERS (National Theatre), AFTER MAGRITTE and THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND. The first of his plays to be staged was ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD.

"I have never left a new play more convinced that I just witnessed a masterpiece." Daily Telegraph [ARCADIA]

With support from NoraLee and Jon Sedmak

Pinter joins stage celebrations
BBC News
news.bbc.co.uk
October 11, 2005

Acclaimed playwrights Sir Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter are to help the English Stage Company celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. Sir Tom is writing Rock 'n' Roll, his first play for the company, which is based at London's Royal Court Theatre. Pinter will act in Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, while an exhibition of actors' portraits will also mark the anniversary. Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry will direct a play for the company.

The company is credited with changing British theatre. Its conflict with authorities over the content of many of its early plays helped abolish theatre censorship in 1968.

Sir Tom's play will be directed by Sir Trevor Nunn and will span the history of Czechoslovakia from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution. Royal Court artistic director Ian Rickson said: "It takes the history of the left, the censors, rock music and identity. It is incredibly fitting that we have a play like that, which is so ambitious, in our 50th anniversary year."
Sir Tom, who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, said: "I want to be part of the Royal Court's history before I pack it in. I don't want to fall under a bus before having a play on its stage."

Pinter, Stoppard back Royal Court Theatre
boston.com
October 11, 2005

LONDON --Two of Britain's greatest living playwrights, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, will help the Royal Court Theatre celebrate its 50th anniversary next year.

Pinter, 75, author of silence-filled plays such as "The Caretaker" and "The Birthday Party" will appear onstage, starring in a production of Samuel Beckett's terse "Krapp's Last Tape," the Royal Court announced Tuesday.

Stoppard, whose teasing, metaphysical dramas include "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" and "Jumpers," will write a new play for the company. Due to open next June, "Rock 'n' Roll" will chart the recent history of Czechoslovakia, from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

"This play is so fitting for the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court. It takes the history of the Left, the censors, rock music and identity," said artistic director Ian Rickson. "It is incredibly fitting that we have a play like that, which is so ambitious, in our 50th anniversary year."

The theater in London's Sloane Square was built in 1888. It reputation as one of Britain's leading venues for new work dates to 1956, when the English Stage Company took up residence and began presenting plays by convention-defying writers including John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Edward Bond.

"I want to be part of the Royal Court's history before I pack it in," said Stoppard, 68, who was born in Czechoslovakia. "Some of my best nights of the last 40 years have been spent in the Royal Court's auditorium. I don't want to fall under a bus before having a play on its stage."

Other highlights of the anniversary season include Tanika Gupta's "Sugar Mummies," a look at Caribbean sex tourism; a revival of Caryl Churchill's "Cloud Nine"; and a production of Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull." "Billy Elliot" director Stephen Daldry will direct a yet-to-be-announced play next fall.

Backstage Whispers overheard by Richard Andrews
TheatreNet.com
14 October, 2005
Last updated : 14th October 2005

The Royal Court Theatre has announced the plays and events that will make up its 50th anniversary season. Though celebrating past triumphs, it concentrates on new writing, with, as previously forecast here, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, set in Czechoslovakia and Britain, moving between 1956, 1968 and the present day, directed by Trevor Nunn; Terry Johnson's Piano/Forte, starring Kelly Reilly and Alicia Witt; Stella Feehily's O Go My Man, looking at relationships in a hectic world of personal and professional commitments, directed by Max Stafford-Clark; Simon Stephens's Motortown, following a soldier returning from Iraq; Tanika Gupta's Sugar Mummies, exploring Jamaican sex tourism, directed by Indhu Rubasingham; and an unnamed play by David Hare, directed by Stephen Daldry. The Theatre Upstairs will host rehearsed readings tracing the journey of the Royal Court from John Osborne's The Entertainer to Roy Williams's Fallout, with, where possible, the original casts. Further celebrations will include a special event to mark the People's Choice, which named The Rocky Horror Show as the theatregoers' favourite Royal Court production (no doubt much to the chagrin of the theatre management). Further information can be found on the RC web site via the link from London Venues in the Links section of TheatreNet.

Stoppard’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Comes to Broadway

Fielding and West play Rock ‘N’ Roll as show extends

Emma Fielding and Dominic West to join Rock ‘n’ Roll next month

Dylan Jones: Even Tom Stoppard, surprised at how his baby has been recieved found it hard to stop smilng
The Independent
Published: 15 August 2006

Stoppard’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Comes to Broadway function getSharePasskey() { return 'ex=1337054400&en=32d14be127ad3b22&ei=5124';}

Fielding and West play Rock ‘N’ Roll as show extends

Emma Fielding and Dominic West to join Rock ‘n’ Roll next month

Dylan Jones: Even Tom Stoppard, surprised at how his baby has been recieved found it hard to stop smilng The Independent Published: 15 August 2006

Stoppard’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Comes to Broadway

Dylan Jones: Even Tom Stoppard, surprised at how his baby has been recieved found it hard to stop smilng
The Independent
Published: 15 August 2006