Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play - Softcover

"Tom Stoppard has written one of the great political plays in the English language. . . . It has a moving, throat-catching intensity. . . . This play shows him at his combative and tolerant best." -- John Peter "Stoppard's exciting new play of immutable passions and mutable politics, Rock 'N' Roll . . . is so flush with feeling that it never seems to stop trembling. . . . Stoppard locates the very rhythm of life. . . . His most emotionally generous play." -- Ben Brantley "Astonishing . . . There is an energy, rawness, and passion here one doesn't associate with the elegant and witty Stoppard, passages of unbuttoned emotion that go straight to the heart. . . . This new piece smells, well, of sex and drugs and Rock 'N' Roll." -- Charles Spencer

Rock 'n' Roll is an electrifying collision of the romantic and the revolutionary. It is 1968 and the world is ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a sound track of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Clutching his prized collection of rock albums, Jan, a Cambridge graduate student, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks roll into Prague. When security forces tighten their grip on artistic expression, Jan is inexorably drawn toward a dangerous act of dissent. Back in England, Jan's volcanic mentor, Max, faces a war of his own as his free-spirited daughter and his cancer-stricken wife attempt to break through his walls of academic and emotional obstinacy. Over the next twenty years of love, espionage, chance, and loss, the extraordinary lives of Jan and Max spin and intersect until an unexpected reunion forces them to see what is truly worth the fight.