British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, winner of an Oscar for his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, comes from the Czech Republic. This may be why he was unable to overlook the communist dictatorship in our country, and decided to fight for human rights and support Czech dissidents like Václav Havel. Even today, you can still follow in the footsteps of the underground movement in Prague – and you can start with Lennon’s Wall. Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia as Tomáš Straussler. His father, a doctor at the Bata company, was given the opportunity to travel to Singapore in 1939, which probably saved the lives of his Jewish family, who would almost certainly have faced an extermination camp. The future Oscar-winning screenwriter did not visit Czechoslovakia again until 38 years later. By then, instead of Nazi totalitarianism, another totalitarian system, Communism, had been ruling the country for thirty years. Hence, Tom Stoppard arrived in his native country, bizarrely surrounded by barbed wire, in 1977, when the frustration of free-thinking Czechs was at its peak. Just three years after Nazism had been defeated in 1945, the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia in a constitutional coup. The post-war years, instead of offering respite after the war, were a period of the harshest Stalinism, full of judicial murders. The Prague Spring, an attempt at political liberalisation, was suppressed in 1968 by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops and the permanent occupation of the country by Soviet soldiers until 1989. Human rights and freedoms were cruelly repressed. In protest against this situation, the Czech dissent organised itself and founded the Charta 77 initiative, calling for respect for human rights. One of the impulses for this act was the fabricated political trial of members of the Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe and other representatives of the underground. All this later found resonance in the work of Tom Stoppard. In the heated atmosphere of his first visit to Prague, Stoppard met the signatories of Charta 77, writer and playwright Pavel Kohout and actor Pavel Landovský; thanks to them, he was able to get to know other dissidents, including Václav Havel. It was Havel’s alter ego Ferdinand Vaněk who became one of the heroes of Stoppard’s most Bohemian play – Rock’n’Roll from 2006. It had its Czech premiere in 2007 at the National Theatre. As the title suggests, rebellious music plays a very important role. It is Stoppard’s artistic reflection on how his life might have unfolded had his family not settled in Britain after the war, but instead returned to Czechoslovakia. Through the mouth of the hesitant intellectual Jan, he asks a series of disturbing questions about the relationship between human freedom, courage and strength of character. At the same time, his rational reflection tensely contrasts the Marxist ravings of Professor Max, a lecturer at Cambridge, the second setting of the play. The story spans a full twenty years, from the beginning of normalisation to the first free Rolling Stones concert in Prague. The concert is an important milestone, as rock music runs through the entire play as a symbol of unbridled freedom. This also makes the opposite true – the destruction of gramophone recordings during a search symbolises the destruction of liberal culture. In Czechoslovakia, its torch was carried by semi-legal or prohibited underground bands, among which The Plastic People of the Universe held a leading position. It doesn’t appear directly in the play, but it is permanently present. In the scenes of his play, Tom Stoppard takes us to very specific places that drew the map of cultural resistance against the communist regime: the Klamovka pub where Prague dissidents used to meet, Bojanovice near Prague for the wedding of the artistic director of The Plastic People, Ivan Martin Jirous, or the iconic Lenon Wall at Velkopřevorské náměstí Square. The cover photo was taken by Jane Bown in 1967.