Tom Stoppard is chatting in the theatre bar when I arrive to interview him about a revival of his play Rock ’n’ Roll. He was comparing ailments with an elderly director friend, he says cheerfully, as he heads up the stairs, having declined an offer of the lift. At 86 he has the nonchalant elegance of a spy in a cold war thriller, lean and mop-haired in a discreetly expensive-looking coat.
Though Stoppard is feted around the world for some of the cleverest plays of the last 60 years, as well as the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, he is more gossipy than grand. “I said to him,” he reports of the conversation from which he has just been dragged away, “I’m being interviewed by the Guardian in half an hour and it’s supposed to be about Rock ’n’ Roll, but I’m going to have to have an opinion about Gaza, aren’t I?”
Being canvassed for opinions comes with the territory for a playwright whose identity straddles two of the biggest faultlines of 20th century history. His most recent play, Leopoldstadt, was a monumental reckoning with a Jewish heritage of which he only became aware in middle age. It ended with Leo, one of three survivors of a mighty dynasty, returning after the war to a Vienna of which he had no memory, having adopted his stepfather’s surname and lived in England since infancy.
Stoppard himself settled in England and adopted his stepfather’s name when he was eight, though his early childhood was spent not in Austria but Czechoslovakia. Rock ’n’ Roll, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2006, contains a different reckoning: what if, instead of getting remarried to an Englishman after the death of Stoppard’s doctor father in the war against Japan, his mother had returned to Soviet Czechoslovakia with him and his brother? “I thought I could write a play which was about myself as I imagined my life might have been from the age of eight,” he says. “And then I would find out whether I was brave enough to be a dissenter, or just somebody who would keep his head down and his nose clean. And I have a terrible feeling that it would have been the latter.”
Rock ’n’ Roll takes place between the viciously suppressed Prague Spring protests of 1968 and the period just after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which put an end to four decades of communist rule and saw the Rolling Stones bring 100,000 fans out for a historic concert in Prague in 1990. The play is framed as a decades-long argument between Jan, a Cambridge PhD student who goes back to Czechoslovakia in 1968, only to become badly disillusioned and nostalgic for the freedoms of the west, and his English professor, Max, who remains a Marxist idealist.
Along the way it takes in the poetry of Sappho, the music of the Stones, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Czech rock group the Plastic People of the Universe, whose arrest at a rock festival in 1976 was one of the inspirations behind the human rights protest Charter 77. The play is dedicated to Stoppard’s friend Václav Havel, who went on to become president of the country in 1989.
Ever since he made his stage debut with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, new Stoppard plays have been an event. Havel, Mick Jagger and the Plastic People were among the audience for the Royal Court premiere of Rock ’n’ Roll, along with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, though sadly not Barrett, its wayward Pan figure, who died days after the play opened.
Why revive it now? Even then, it was a history play, he says. “Plays don’t become dated, they become a period, and that’s all to the good.” There’s the small matter that he hasn’t been moved to write anything new in the four years since Leopoldstadt. This is a rare visit to London from the Dorset cottage where he lives with his third wife, Sabrina Guinness. “I’m busy the whole time, but I’ve been completely unproductive,” he says. “And you know, I may have stopped without realising it.”
Then he returns to the question. “If you mean what is the relevance of Rock ’n’ Roll today? As Tommy Lee Jones said in The Fugitive, ‘I don’t care.’ I don’t think relevance enters into the minds of the audience.” He ponders for a minute then backs down a bit: “If the play had been revived five or 10 years ago, one would be talking about Czechoslovakia going wrong in a way, becoming very consumerist and turning into what Havel feared, because, as he said, the Velvet Revolution wasn’t about trying to turn Czechoslovakia into West Germany: he was much more idealistic. And liberal, of course. And as it happens, in recent times, it has taken a turn for the better, towards more progressive government. It might have gone the way of Hungary for all one knew, but it hasn’t and won’t.”
All his political opinions come with the caveat that he prefers to sit with his nose in a history book than keep up with current affairs. Of the traumatic war between Israel and Hamas, he says: “I had no problem at all knowing where I stood on the 8, 9 or 10 of October. But after a while, you have to think it through and ask yourself why you stand where you stand. And before you know where you are, you are not sure where you do stand. It’s a horrible one. All those premature babies.”
Then, with a sleight of perspective that is typical of his work, he pivots from the specific to the general, saying: “For years and years I’ve been unable to get into a hot shower without having the thought of how unusual this could be. To turn on a tap and hot water comes out – it makes you think of all the places in the world where there is no tap to turn.”
The danger of voicing strong political opinions was drilled into him by his mother, he says. “Even when I was getting involved from a distance in eastern European affairs, speaking up for Russian Jews or Czech musicians, my mother was ticking me off for putting my head above the parapet. I kept explaining to her that there was no parapet in England, and there was absolutely no danger of any kind in anything you wanted to speak up for. Which of course she knew, but she also was no innocent when it came to how communism worked. We had relatives back home, and when the cold war was really cold, it wasn’t a good thing to have relatives in the west if you were a Czechoslovakian citizen.”
His mother died in 1996, “so there was still a lot in the future for her to worry about if she’d lived to know about these things. If the world seemed to be in a pretty poor state then, just look at it now.” In Rock ’n’ Roll, Jan is nostalgic for the freedoms of England. “Things said loudly about England, about Britain, you cannot say today in the same confident way,” says Stoppard. “There is far, far more restriction, and a sort of self-censorship as well. So when poor Jan – in a scene set in 1971 – talks about the England he loves, without the England he fell in love with and grew up in, it turns into a kind of mad utopian hallucination. But at the core of it, there’s still some kind of truth you know.”
Back in 1979, Stoppard described himself as “a conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre”. In 1997, he accepted a knighthood for his contribution to theatre. He has always been the new playwright of choice for the establishment, rewarding it with vociferous gratitude for England’s adoption of him. How has his own faith in the establishment fared? “I think England has survived in certain essential ways,” he says. “I mean, constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. There’s no other way, in my view, that it’s better to be.” But ultimately he’s more interested in talking about the morning’s one-star review of The Crown in the Guardian. “That was quite a corker, wasn’t it?” he says, delightedly.
Rock ’n’ Roll is at Hampstead theatre, London, from 6 December to 27 January
