22 hours ago
10
By the time I was cast in Rock’n’Roll in 2006 I had been following Tom for years. I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it came to London in 1967 with the wonderful Graham Crowden as the Player King. It was a big sensation. The Real Thing was a great play and Arcadia was extraordinary.
Rock’n’Roll was w at the Royal Court in London by Trevor Nunn and starred Rufus Sewell as Jan, a Czech student who returns to Prague in 1968. I played Max, a Marxist academic. It was a fascinating experience, because there were two plays there: the play about Sappho, the Ancient Greek poet, and the play about the Soviet takeover in Czechoslovakia.
It was a statement about what Tom believed. In it, he talked about the Plastic People of the Universe, the real-life psychedelic Czech band who were banned by the communist government even though they did not see themselves as political. I’d heard it before, when I went to Russia in the 1980s to work with students of the Moscow Art Theatre School. There was a young actor called Ravil Isyanov, sadly no longer with us, who people thought was a KGB boy. He wasn’t: the problem was he loved the Beatles. All his compadres were suspicious of this Beatles thing and I just thought, no, the guy’s got a good sense of music.
What distinguished Tom as a writer were his clear and purposeful ideas. He knew what his purpose was in everything he wrote and there was no way you could deviate from that. Max was based on Eric Hobsbawm, the great intellectual Marxist, but ideas were more important to Tom than character. I said to him: “Why am I sitting here listening to a lecture on Syd Barrett if I’m based on Eric Hobsbawm? Why am I here?” He said: “Because you are.”
It was as simple as that and you couldn’t go any further. He was great at getting you into a corner where you couldn’t argue any more. Yet there was never any harshness in him. He was always charming.
We had this amazing first night. In the audience were Václav Havel, the former president of Czechoslovakia; Timothy Garton Ash, the historian; and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. I remember looking through the curtain and seeing Mick Jagger being spoon-fed by his girlfriend. Audiences loved it and it did well critically. Then New York audiences loved it too. Tom really understood what the audience’s need was without giving in. He was very clever that way.
Despite being born in the former Czechoslovakia, he was quintessentially English and so proper, almost upper-class in his manner. Nicole Ansari, my wife, was also in the show, playing Lenka, the Czech student. One day, we were parking near the Royal Court when, a couple of cars down, we saw Tom. He had been sitting in his car for a while and we were a bit worried about him: “Do we say anything?”
We went up and knocked on the door and said: “Tom, are you OK?” He said: “Yes, I’m fine. Why?” We said: “We wondered, because you’ve been sitting here for a while.”
He said: “Well, I’m waiting for the meter to go to 12pm because I got here a bit early and then I shall deposit my coin and we can move on.”
I said: “Why?” He said: “My dear boy, it’s all a question of elegance.”
He was a man who believed in elegance. It was about picking your moment. He was an astonishing man.
