Word: stoppards
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With Rock 'n' Roll, which took London by storm last year and opens on Broadway Nov. 4, Stoppard is exploring two more of his passions, one old and one relatively new. The play spans a couple of decades in the lives of a group of Czech political activists and British academics and shuttles back and forth between Cambridge and Prague in the years between the 1968 Soviet invasion and the "velvet revolution" of 1989. It's an exploration of political repression and commitment (with a typically Stoppardian digression into Sappho's poetry), but also a celebration of the rebel rock...
Rock 'n' Roll is the first stage work Stoppard has written explicitly about Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1937 but which he left as a baby when his parents fled the Nazis, moving to Singapore and then India before landing in Bristol, England...
Those schoolboy days ended at age 17, when Stoppard went to work for a newspaper in Bristol. He covered the police beat and routine local news, but he also got to interview visiting celebrities--New Orleans jazz musicians, British movie-glamour queen Diana Dors. "I was so thrilled being a reporter," he says, "because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet." After a few years, he moved to London, where he continued to write reviews and celebrity profiles. In 1960 he talked his way into a trip to New York...
...Stoppard's passion for rock music dates from his days in Bristol, where he would see most of the touring music acts that came to town--among them Frank Sinatra (who played the Bristol Hippodrome in the early '50s and didn't sell out), the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran, the rockabilly singer whose British tour ended when he was killed in a car crash in 1960. Like everyone else, Stoppard embraced the Beatles and Rolling Stones when they came along, but he admits to being a late bloomer when it came to Pink Floyd. "I ignored them completely...
...twice-divorced Stoppard, who turned 70 this year, is a grandfather now, but he keeps up with groups like Arcade Fire and the Arctic Monkeys. "I listen to what shows up, really out of curiosity more than anything else," he says. "It's not often that something really gets to me." He goes to concerts only rarely--for the Stones when they tour and an occasional experiment like Oasis (a "brilliant songwriting band"). "I'm a very boring person," he insists. He doesn't go to movies, he says (though he writes plenty of them; see box), and spends most...