Copyright © 2006 by Tom Stoppard

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      CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Rock ‘n’ Roll is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

      First-class professional, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London, WC2B 5HA, England, ATTN: Kenneth Ewing, and paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.

       Printed in the United States of America

      FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

      eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9536-4

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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      Distributed by Publishers Group West

       www.groveatlantic.com

      For Václav Havel

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My first debt is to Václav Havel, whose essays, commentaries and letters from 1965 to 1990 and beyond were not just indispensable to the play but a continual inspiration in the writing. I am indebted, too, to Paul Wilson and Jaroslav Riedel for many helpful conversations about the Plastic People of the Universe and the Rock ‘n’ Roll scene in Czechoslovakia. My thanks are due to David Gilmour, Tim Willis, Martin Deeson, Trevor Griffiths, Eric Hobsbawm, David West, Peter Jones and many others who allowed me to bother them with my questions.

      T.S.

       INTRODUCTION

      In the first draft of Rock ‘n’ Roll Jan was called Tomas, my given name which, I suppose, is still my name. My surname was legally changed when I was, like Jan, unexpectedly ‘a little English schoolboy’.

      This is not to say that the parallels between Jan’s life and mine go very far. He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.

      The two-year overlap was the basis of my identification with Jan, and why I started off by calling him Tomas. His love of England and of English ways, his memories of his mother baking buchty and his nostalgia for his last summer and winter as an English schoolboy are mine.

      If that had been the whole play (or part of a play I’d often thought about writing, an autobiography in a parallel world where I returned ‘home’ after the war), Tomas would have been a good name for the protagonist. But with Rock ‘n’ Roll the self-reference became too loose, and, for a different reason, misleading, too, because I also had in mind another Tomas altogether, the Tomas of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

      In that book there is a scene where Tomas refuses to sign a petition on behalf of political prisoners gaoled by Husák’s ‘government of normalisation’, which followed the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies.