Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard has painted a bleak view of the future ahead of the revival of one of his most famous works.
Stoppard, 86 is bringing back Rock ‘n’ Roll, which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2006, for a new production at the Hampstead Theatre and, in a new interview, he has suggested that the play predicted what has become known as “cancel culture”.
It’s fear of speaking out of turn that prompted the Czech-born Stoppard to share his not-so-positive musings on the future, stating the belief the “world has changed” since he shot to fame in 1960.
“The alteration of the world is in a state of acceleration and it’s unknown,” he told The Times, adding: “A rather cowardly attitude to take, I suppose, but I am frightened of experiencing the world to come. I don’t think we can even begin to know what form it will take.”
When pushed to elaborate on his fears over being cancelled for saying the wrong thing, the playwright continued: “I can’t remember a time when it’s been as difficult to know where I stand on certain things. There’s no safe place. Even saying that much would trouble some of my friends for sure.”
Stoppard, who settled in Britain after fleeing imminent Nazi occupation, reiterated his fears while speaking to Evening Standard, adding: “I grew up in an England which I learned to revere as being a place where certain virtues were actually invented, and free expression in the public print was one of them,” he said.
“People are now deemed to be much more needful of protection from any kind of a rebuke, reproach, criticism. There’s a great sensitivity about how you can talk about anything which might obscurely offend part of the readership.”
Tom Stoppard with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ director Nina Raine— (Manuel Harlan)
Stoppard said he is somewhat hopeful for the UK as “we actually live in a country where there is freedom of speech in politics, and we’re looking at countries all over the place where there is not freedom of speech”.
But while this “freedom of speech” has provided Stoppard with the means to” express” himself as he wishes via his writing, he told the outlet that there are now more attempts than ever to muzzle people who try to speak out about what they believe in, something he branded ”outrageous”.
Rock ‘n’ Roll , which spans several decades, is set during the emergence of the socialist movement in Eastern-Bloc Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
Its two central characters have conflicting ideals – there’s the young Czech PhD student, who becomes disgusted by the increasingly hostile regime in his home country, and his British Marxist professor, who continues to believe in Soviet ideologies.
But it’s a line of dialogue spoken by another character, named Lenka, that Stoppard has recently been reflecting on – telling The Times “it has become more acute” in today’s world, and essentially predicted “cancel culture”.
Stoppard said in his Times interview: “She ends up warning, ‘This country isn’t what it thinks it is. It’s now a competition of apology, apologising for history, apologising for what used to be good manners,’ and so on.’ And that was pretty current when the play was written, and it’s become more acute.
“The word cancellation in the current sense though? I don’t think it existed when the play was being written.”
Stoppard is one of the most performed dramatists of his generation around the world.
His previous works include the plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Coast of Utopia, and the screenplay for 1998 film Shakespeare in Love.
