In 2006, on an unfortunate journey, a friend picked me up and took me to civilization. “Whoever is tired of London is tired of life”, said Doctor Johnson, and London knew how to awaken me from my tiredness and discouragement. Furthermore, it contributed to my rediscovery of theater, which began with “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, by Tom Stoppard (1937-2025). The play, although it has a character inspired by Syd Barrett, and some imitators of the Velvet Underground or Frank Zappa, is not an ode to music, but a tribute to the Czech resisters, including a friend of Stoppard, also the playwright Václav Havel (Tom Stoppard was born Tomás Straüssler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, the family fled the war in Europe and then the war in the Pacific, later settled in the United Kingdom, and he became more English than the English, if it weren’t for the accent and the slurred RR). The idea that resistance to communism involved banal gestures such as playing the electric guitar or wearing long hair may seem counterintuitive to a Westerner, but it had to do with the idea of the policy of small gestures defended by Havel. On the other hand, there was a notable comic dimension to the text, because while Czech intellectuals became disenchanted with the regime, or fought it, British intellectuals, like one of the protagonists (played by the colossal Brian Cox), yearned for a socialist society. What interested me in “Rock ‘n’ Roll” was the possibility of a theater of ideas that was anything but didactic, and of a reticent text but with implied emotions (a Brecht in reverse, if you like). And I was fascinated by the ability to give voice and dignity to different ideas, even those most contrary to those of the author, the abundance of perfectly calibrated references, the verbal brilliance and the cultured humor (“what to do?” asks the communist academic while setting the table, and a young man who helps him, less versed in Leninism, says “now it’s the forks”, or something like that).