I have always been a huge fan of Tom Stoppard’s plays and movies especially Arcadia, Shakespeare in Love and Empire of the Sun. I just saw Rock ‘n’ Roll, a play about communism, the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia and rock and roll as a symbol of freedom. It’s not as good as Arcadia, but I truly loved the dialogue, the characters and their evolution.

You literally see the intellectual level of the discussion go down as we progress through time from 1968 to 1990 and the characters age, lose their British accent and society seemingly dumbs down (“What? They give hints in A levels now?”). In contrast, some of the early discussions on communism, materialism, objectivism and the poetry of Sappho were mind boggling and I was enthralled listening to them!