Sir Tom Stoppard – Roll call

One of Britain's greatest living playwrights Sir Tom Stoppard on being a music fan, having writer's block and the major revival of his play Rock 'n' Roll in London

- By Hannah Ewens

'I’m one of human nature’s fans, really. I could’ve been a groupie.” These are the words of 86-year-old Sir Tom Stoppard minutes after taking an afternoon cigarette break outside Hampstead Theatre. He is enthusiastically recounting the time the director Sir Michael Lindsay Hogg introduced him to another knighted British gentleman of note, Sir Mick Jagger. Subsequently, Stoppard and Jagger became friendly, and in a full-circle moment The Rolling Stones frontman came to the 2006 opening night of Stoppard’s play Rock ’n’ Roll, which features music by The Rolling Stones. “By that time, I was going to see the band’s concerts with the precious access laminate,” Stoppard says with a proud grin.

It’s here at this theatre that Rock ’n’ Roll is to have its first major revival in the UK, at Stoppard’s suggestion and with his supervision. The plot is too amorphous and discursive to successfully recount in full but the decades-spanning political play, broken up with famous rock music songs as interludes, culminates with two characters going to a Rolling Stones concert in Prague in 1990. After most of the action consisting of sparring wordplay between Jan, a young Czech PhD student and rock music fan, who hates the repressive politics playing out in his home country, and his British Marxist professor, Max, who is a communist, this final scene is a welcome one of love, joy and the simple power of live music.