Tom Stoppard has built his career on dramatically inverting or actualizing highly theoretical subject matter into a wholly entertaining dramatic work. Rock ‘N’ Roll, his most recent play, is no exception, dancing around the relationships among the personal, political, and aesthetic aspects of life.
Rock ‘N’ Roll is spliced between the worlds of Cambridge University and Soviet Prague, and the lives of protagonists Max and Jan. Max, one of the last remaining members of the Communist Party on the Cambridge faculty, desperately sticks to his ideological viewpoints despite a barrage of opposition and the realities of Soviet communism. Max's wife Eleanor is a classical philologist and romantic idealist who is Max's intellectual and social foil in just about any endeavor. Jan, however, develops a rebellious political conscience around his love of music, even preferring aesthetic rebelliousness and paradoxically subversive inactivity to more direct political action.
In one particularly striking scene, Max confronts his wife Eleanor, who is dying of cancer, over the traditional mind/body problem as a tangential point to a discussion of Sappho. Max argues from a Marxist materialist viewpoint, while Eleanor comes from a classical idealist viewpoint. The discussion turns from philology and classics to the basic tenets of materialism and its relation to culture. The scene, which contrasts sharply with Jan’s preceding defense of the transcendent power of musical rebellion, centers on Max’s key hypocrisy: his belief in the ideals but not the realities of Communism, despite the inherent materialism in Marxist philosophy. Max turns to biological determinism to deflect the larger contradictions between Marxist theory and practice after Stalin in the Soviet bloc.
Rock 'N' Roll depicts a world where the role of culture and art becomes indistinguishable from politics, and in many ways surpasses outright ideology in importance. While Max is a lackadaisical Marxist, Jan transcends politics and philosophy through his love of a rock band, the Czech dissident group The Plastic People of the Universe. Jan is a Czech native raised in England—modeled in part on Stoppard himself—who leaves his studies in Cambridge to return to his homeland after the Prague Spring. The play is heavily influenced by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and like that book’s protagonist, Jan refuses to sign a petition against those imprisoned by Husák’s “politics of normalization.”
Yet Jan does eventually put into motion a petition to free The Plastic People of the Universe after the band is imprisoned. Jan’s acceptance of this distinction comes from what Stoppard describes in his introduction as the inability to “separate disengagement from dissidence.” When Jan begins a petition to free the Plastics, his political activist friend Ferdinand berates him for caring more about music than politics (in early drafts of the script, Ferdinand’s full name was Ferdinand Vanek, a recurring character in the plays of Václav Havel). Jan counters with a monologue explaining what separated arrests of political dissidents from the arrest of Plastics ringleader Ivan Jirous over insulting a policeman:
JAN No, because the policeman insulted him. About his hair. Jirous doesn’t cut his hair. It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol. But what is the policeman angry about? What difference does long hair make? The policeman is angry about his fear. The policeman’s fear is what makes him angry. He’s frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics, they’re pagans.
The larger significance of Jan’s defense of the rebel-without-a-cause line of reasoning is his conviction that there is a realm that no politics of normalization can touch: the distinct individuality of the human spirit as expressed through art. While the politics of normalization is a politically oppressive offshoot of the Marxist notion that intellect derives from the social and political relationships between the laborer and the ruling class, Jan’s argument goes back to Schiller’s idealism, which not coincidentally was devised by a dramatist in the face of an intellectually oppressive regime. In On The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller noted, “Art is the daughter of Freedom, and takes her orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not in the exigencies of matter.” To Schiller, no materialist account of freedom, be it through the emphasis on utility or on pure reason, could fully grasp the political as well as personal freedom of an aesthetic education.
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