Rock 'N' Roll

by Tom Stoppard

  MAX Yes, we’ve done that one. She’s trying to persuade Eleanor to live on wild garlic. Skol.

  JAN Skol. Why?

  MAX The cancer came back.

  JAN Fuck. I’m so …

  MAX Yes.

  JAN Is she …?

  MAX Still teaching. Throwing up and bald as a coot, but you know Eleanor …

  JAN Yes. Bold as a … coot?

  MAX Not bold, bald. She’s lost all her hair.

  JAN Oh … yes.

  MAX And you. You’ve still got work at the paper?

  JAN Technically yes, but now I work in the kitchens.

  Max laughs.

  MAX Husák certainly made a fool of you.

  JAN (shrugs) I was an optimist for … nine months. It was great. I had my own column.

  MAX A column about what?

  JAN Anything I liked.

  Max smiles at him broadly, mirthlessly.

  JAN (cont.) It was a question of which way to be useful. It’s not useful to be a critic of what is over and done. I was a critic of the future. It was my socialist right. But when I refused to sign the loyalty pledge I was purged into the kitchen. Kitchen porter! That was some purge, hey? Twelve hundred scientists. Eight hundred university professors!

  MAX Nine hundred.

  JAN Ah—the score. Also half my fellow journalists. Self-censorship about the Russian occupation didn’t save us. Loyalty meant kissing their Soviet arses. I would have tried to emigrate but …

  Jan removes a record album from the bag—The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett.

  JAN (cont.) Huh …

  MAX What?

  JAN (misunderstanding) She wrote on the sleeve. ‘Now do you believe me?’

  MAX But what?

  JAN (absent, asking permission) Is it okay?

  Max is seething. Jan doesn’t notice. He moves to put the record on.

  MAX You would have emigrated but what?

  JAN Yes … I was offered a job in Frankfurt… but I don’t know … German rock bands …

  SYD BARRETT (sings, on record) ‘Lean out of your window,

  Golden Hair,

  I heard you singing

  In the midnight air.’ (continues)

  MAX (erupts) I never heard anything so pathetic. Do everybody a favour, go and live in the West, it’s where you belong. You bedwetter! If it wasn’t for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country’d be a German province now—and you wouldn’t be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss everywhere except in the toilet, you’d be smoke up the chimney.

  Jan is shocked. He stops the record. Max refills his glass and drinks. He steadies himself.

  MAX (cont.) I’m exactly as old as the October Revolution. I grew up with the fight against Fascism. In the slums, in Spain, the Arctic convoys … And today on a urinal wall I saw where someone had scrawled a hammer and sickle and a swastika joined by an equals sign. If I’d caught who did that, I’d probably have killed him. (He drinks.) And Esme thinks a Fascist is a mounted policeman at a demo in Grosvenor Square.

  JAN So.

  MAX (turns to him) There’s something which keeps happening to me. More and more now that I’m getting to be half-famous for not leaving the Communist Party. I meet somebody, it could be a visiting professor, or someone fixing my car, anyone … and what they all want to know, though they don’t know how to ask, because they don’t want to be rude, is—how come, when it’s obvious even to them, how come I don’t get it? And it’s the same here. I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he’s fascinated by me. He’s never met a Communist before. I’m like the last white rhino. Why don’t I get it?

  JAN So why don’t you?

  MAX Don’t push it. A workers’ state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work. What the hell else?

  JAN How about… ballet?

  Max grins amiably, he’s calm now.

  MAX ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. What could be more simple, more rational, more beautiful? It was the right idea in the wrong conditions for fifty years and counting. A blip. Christ, we waited long enough for someone to have it.

  JAN A blip. Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler. Perhaps we aren’t good enough for this beautiful idea. This is the best we can do with it. Marx knew we couldn’t be trusted. First the dictatorship, till we learned to be good, then the utopia where a man can be a baker in the morning, a lawmaker in the afternoon and a poet in the evening. But we never learned to be good, so look at us. A one-legged man showed up at my school once. He waited outside the classroom. It turned out the man with one leg had come to say goodbye to our teacher. Afterwards, the teacher explained to us his friend lost his leg in the war, so as a special favour he’d been given permission to go and live near his sister somewhere in north Bohemia. ‘You see,’ our teacher said, ‘how Communism looks after its war heroes.’ So I put my hand up. God, I must have been stupid. I really thought it would be interesting for them, so I said in England anyone could live anywhere they liked, even if they had two legs. My mother was questioned and she lost her job at the shoe factory, but the point is the other kids in the class. They thought I was telling travellers’ tales. They couldn’t grasp the idea of a country where someone, anyone, could decide to move to another town and just go there. Suppose everybody wanted to live in Bohemia when their job is in Moravia! How would such a society work?

  MAX And you didn’t explain?

  JAN Explain what?

  MAX How it works. How everyone’s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it’s absolutely legal to be unemployed.

  JAN Your problems are yours, you fix them, okay? I love England. I would like to live forever in my last English schoolboy summer. It was exceptional, you know? 1947, endless summer days, I collected birds’ eggs, and the evenings so long you couldn’t sleep for the light, listening to the farmer’s boy calling the cattle home. And the winter was amazing that year. A Christmas card winter. My mother knew all the songs. She baked svestkove buchty for my friends, and sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’ in a terrible accent over the washtub. I was happy.

  MAX Jesus Christ.

  JAN If I was English I wouldn’t care if Communism in Czechoslovakia reformed itself into a pile of pig shit. To be English would be my luck. I would be moderately enthusiastic and moderately philistine, and a good sport. I would be kind to foreigners in a moderately superior way, and also to animals except for the ones I kill, and I would live a decent life, like most English people. How many voted for the party, Max?

  MAX About two-tenths of one per cent. It’s called the parliamentary route to government.

  JAN You got the strange gods vote: Marxism, Fascism, anarchism kept on the side of the plate like a little bit of salt to bring out the flavour of English moderation. A thousand years of knowing who you are gives a people confidence in its judgement. Words mean what they have always meant. With us, words change meaning to make the theory fit the practice. We eat salt. Come on in, Max! Give me your place! Because I dream of having what you invented—trial by jury, independent judges—you can call the government fools and criminals but the law is for free speech, the same for the highest and the lowest, the law makes freedom normal, the denial of freedom must prove its case, and if the government doesn’t like it, tough shit, they can’t touch you, the law is constant—and yet, what you have set your heart on, Max, the only thing that will make you happy, is that the workers own the means of production. I would give it to you gladly if I could keep the rest.

  Max turns ugly.

  MAX What do you want it for?

  JAN To live free.

  MAX The little diddums!—still sucking on philosophy’s tit! For you, freedom means, ‘Leave me alone.’ For the masses it means, ‘Give me a break.’

  He puts on his coat etc.

  MAX (cont.) Social relations are economic, as I thought we’d agreed at Cambridge. You, me and Marx …

  JAN So. Some sunny day.


  MAX So, at Cambridge, why were you pretending to be what you were not?

  Max leaves.

  After a moment, Jan restarts the record on the turntable.

  SYD BARRETT (sings, on record)‘Lean out of your window,

  Golden Hair,

  I heard you singing

  In the midnight air …’

  The sound fades out. Jan continues to listen.

  Exterior—continuous.

  MILAN on a street bench—who may have been visible waiting and watching throughout the scene—stands up to meet Max approaching.

  MILAN Max … Ahoj. (reproachfully) I left you a message at the hotel.

  MAX Milan … that thing in Cambridge in ’68 … it was a one-off, a titbit, an accident. A goodwill gesture. There’s no more where that came from. I’m not worth cultivating.

  MILAN (cheerfully) You’re too modest. How is your old pupil?

  Milan takes out a small tin of lozenges and puts one delicately into his mouth. Max declines a lozenge.

  MAX Jan? He learned nothing.

  Max and Milan leave.

  Jan is still listening to the record.

  SYD BARRETT (sings, on record)

  ‘… singing and singing a merry air,

  Lean out of your window,

  Golden Hair …’

  Blackout—‘Astronomy Domine’ by Pink Floyd picking up thirty seconds in.

  Smash cut to morning and silence. Summer 1972. Jan is looking at a sheet of paper. The lavatory flushes, heard through its open door.

  JAN (raising his voice) I’m supposed to sign this?

  A young woman enters in her slip: MAGDA.

  MAGDA Aren’t you going to work?

  JAN Magda, when did Ferdinand leave this?

  MAGDA He was at Klamovka. We waited for you.

  She smells him carefully like a dog, half-serious.

  MAGDA (cont.) Where were you, then?

  JAN At the police station. As a witness. Jirous got shoved around by a drunk outside the party, and two cops sprayed his eyes and arrested him. They let him go this morning.

  MAGDA That’s good, now they’ve got your name down as a witness for a dissident.

  JAN He’s not a dissident, he’s a hooligan. The band was great, anyway … a lot of new material.

  MAGDA You should get a tambourine and go full-time like Linda with Paul.

  JAN I can’t afford to turn amateur. Haven’t you got lectures?

  Jan looks at the piece of paper again.

  MAGDA I can’t face it this morning. It’s you who’s late, Jan.

  JAN They changed my shift. Did Ferdinand ask you to sign his petition?

  MAGDA Of course not. Some of us have careers to study for.

  She goes out to continue dressing.

  JAN (laughs at the paper) It’s so polite. It doesn’t protest against the sentences, it’s just please dear kind Dr Husák, please be generous and include these three intellectuals in the amnesty next Christmas out of the goodness of your heart so they can go back to their families …

  Magda comes back in a skirt, doing up her blouse.

  MAGDA So will you sign it?

  JAN No, I won’t sign it. First because it won’t help Hubl and the others, but mainly because helping them is not its real purpose. Its real purpose is to let Ferdinand and his friends feel they’re not absolutely pointless. It’s just moral exhibitionism.

  MAGDA What’s moral exhibitionism?

  JAN All they’re doing is exploiting the prisoners’ misfortune to draw attention to themselves. If they’re so concerned for the families they should go and do something useful for the families, instead of—for all they know—making things worse for the prisoners.

  MAGDA Well, you’ll be able to tell him that.

  She looks for and finds her shoes.

  JAN Hey, Magda, who’s been at my records?

  MAGDA Ferda borrowed one.

  JAN When?

  MAGDA Maybe two. I think one with the cows.

  JAN Atom Heart Mother!

  MAGDA He wanted to make tapes.

  JAN (looking for a record) He’s taken Madcap Laughs.

  MAGDA What?

  JAN My Syd Barrett!

  MAGDA He said he’d bring them back before you even noticed.

  JAN When the hell would that be?!

  There’s a scratching at the door. Jan jumps up and opens the door—to Ferdinand, who has the missing records in a bag.

  JAN (cont.) There’s a bell, you bastard.

  FERDINAND Ahoj.

  MAGDA They changed his shift.

  She kisses Jan and leaves.

  Jan takes the bag, takes the records out of their sleeves, looks at them, puts them back. He relaxes a bit.

  FERDINAND (meanwhile) Jan, Jan … Hey, how about that? Pink Floyd without Syd Barrett, and Syd Barrett without Pink Floyd. How long have you had these?

  JAN A while.

  FERDINAND What happened?

  JAN The Floyd dumped Barrett.

  FERDINAND It shows.

  JAN He was out of it with drugs.

  FERDINAND He sounds out of it. But I love him.

  Ferdinand finds his petition.

  Jan looks at the sleeve of the Madcap Laughs album and removes the disc.

  JAN He went home to his mum in Cambridge. He comes from Cambridge. I nearly saw him once, or maybe not. A girl I know thinks she saw him and he sang to her … only, she didn’t know it was him. But she was high a lot of the time, so I don’t know … maybe it was the great god Pan.

  Jan puts the record on the player.

  FERDINAND Will you sign this?

  JAN No.

  SYD BARRETT (sings, on record)

  ‘I really love you and I mean you,

  The star above you crystal blue,

  Well oh baby my hair’s on end about you …’

  Blackout and ‘Jugband Blues’ by Pink Floyd.

  Smash cut to night and silence.

  Spring 1974.

  Ferdinand is reading a piece of paper. Jan is watching him nervously.

  JAN Underground concerts are so rare now, kids from all over the country got the word and found their way to this nowhere place. So did busloads of police, with dogs. They stopped the concert and herded everyone to the railway station and through a tunnel under the tracks, and in the tunnel the police laid into everybody with truncheons. Rock ‘n’ Roll!

  FERDINAND So, what am I supposed to do with this?

  JAN Get your friends to sign it.

  FERDINAND What friends?

  JAN You know, those banned writers and intellectuals you hang out with.

  FERDINAND And this would be different from moral exhibitionism, would it?

  JAN Yeah. A genuine moral action.

  FERDINAND Oh, good. How is that, by the way?

  JAN Well, because you’ve got no interest in these kids and they’ve got no interest in you.

  FERDINAND That’s the difference?

  JAN Yeah, they don’t care about politics… If people want to pick a fight with the government, that’s their business.

  FERDINAND They should take what comes, you mean.

  JAN No … well, yeah … Perhaps you’re missing the point.

  FERDINAND Perhaps you’d like a smack in the mouth, but the difference is still eluding me.

  JAN (roused) These are schoolkids, they’ll get expelled and end up with the lowest work available in the paradise of full employment, and what I’m saying is they didn’t pick the fight. They didn’t ask for anything except to be left alone for a while. It’s not just the music, it’s the oxygen. You know what I mean.

  FERDINAND Why don’t you get your friend Jirous to sign it?

  JAN He’s in gaol.

  FERDINAND What for?

  JAN Free expression. Somebody in a pub called him a big girl, so Jirous called him a bald-headed Bolshevik, and he turned out to be state security.

  FERDINAND Yes, well, with Jirous you never know. Maybe insulting people in pubs
is his idea of art.

  JAN He thinks you’re a bunch of tossers, too.

  FERDINAND Does he?

  JAN The ‘official opposition’. The fans just want to be left alone to do their thing.

  FERDINAND This isn’t about the fans, it’s about the band.

  JAN Same thing.

  FERDINAND (getting angry) You want me to ask serious men—

  JAN Women, too, would be good.

  FERDINAND —who are working in boiler rooms and timberyards—

  JAN And breweries, right—famous odd job men.

  FERDINAND —to invite the police to arrest them—

  JAN Arrest them for what?

  FERDINAND —so that your druggy drop-out weirdo friends with hair down to here can be allowed to do their own thing? You’re an arsehole!

  JAN That’s a no, then.

  Jan takes the petition back.

  FERDINAND You’re a political imbecile. There’s no leverage in asking people to come out for people people don’t give a shit about.

  JAN Relax, Ferdinand.

  FERDINAND I mean, who are they?

  JAN Forget it. How’s Magda?

  FERDINAND What?

  JAN How’s—

  FERDINAND She’s fine—in fact, I forgot—she sends her love …

  JAN Her love?

  FERDINAND Let me explain—

  JAN No, I get it.

  FERDINAND You don’t get it.

  JAN Send her mine.

  FERDINAND What?

  JAN Should I put on a record?

  FERDINAND No, let me explain. I don’t believe in cultural hierarchy. Dvorak did his thing, the Plastic People do their thing … I do my thing—fine, the more the merrier and everyone’s welcome. Except that none of us is welcome as things are. Except for Dvorak. But—my point is—

  JAN I don’t really want to—

  FERDINAND Who’s going to change things for the rest? Not the ones who just want to be left alone. The Plastics won’t change things so Vaculík and Grusa can publish their books. But we’re putting ourselves on the line for a society where the Plastics can play their music.

  JAN Excellent point.

  FERDINAND Fuck you, just answer me one question. You’ve read Havel’s letter to Husák?

  JAN No.

  FERDINAND That wasn’t the question. But Havel has written this open letter about what’s gone wrong in Czechoslovakia, the apathy, the spiritual paralysis, the self-destructive tendency of what he calls post-totalitarian—