Rock n roll vs. Stalinist communism. That s one duality in this deep-digging evening. Another in parallel is unreconstructed British Communist Max Morrow, a roaring, aging lion at Cambridge University, vs.

his former prized student, the Czech-born (like Stoppard) Jan, who, having returned to Prague to save rock n roll and my mother and socialism with a human face after the tanks rolled in, would receive for his idealistic pains imprisonment followed by 12 years of enforced labor in a state-run bakery. Plus the state police smashing his entire record collection (an echo of a similar cruelty in the 1955 Hollywood movie The Blackboard Jungle ).