A British academic crosses the Iron Curtain to speak at an official conference, with an ulterior motive. In hindsight’s rosy light, you might guess that Professor Anderson (we never learn his first name) from Cambridge is set on subverting the regime. In fact, he wants only to watch a football match.
That is an early plot twist in Professional Foul, a television play by Tom Stoppard, who died last week aged 88. Without spoiling the Czech-born British playwright’s plot, I can say that Anderson’s trip turns out differently. Dilemmas and traumas puncture his arrogant, theoretical approach to ethics; they lead him to become both nobler and more devious.
Professional Foul, first screened in 1977, is not just brilliantly written, thought-provoking and amusing. It reflects with accuracy the slovenly drabness (beige, brown, grey) that I remember from my own years as a foreign correspondent behind the Iron Curtain. Watching it last night, I could again almost smell the disinfectant on the floors, and the harsh tang of lignite fumes cutting through the steamy, greasy odour of Soviet-block catering.
More importantly than Communism’s unpleasant aesthetics, it also depicts the essence of the Czechoslovak regime installed by the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, and highlights the understated bravery of those who risk their own and their families’ happiness and safety for a higher cause. Jan Patočka, a (real) philosophy professor, died under secret police interrogation earlier in 1977. He was a signatory of Charter 77, a human-rights petition whose modest demands attracted ferocious vilification (and worse) from the regime. This echoed, but did not match, the full-on brutality of the Stalinist 1950s. It featured superficial respectability (wow—a philosophy conference!) enforced mostly by bullying, snooping and cowardly tricks: a fire alarm, not censorship, silences a rogue foreign lecturer.
For British and later other Western audiences, Professional Foul was a revelation. A familiar world of hotels, restaurants, conferences and football tickets is the backdrop for bewildering paradoxes and quandaries. What would you do in such a situation? What should we do about a system that creates such misery and sparks such heroism?
Those questions helped ignite the cause of cultural freedom in the captive nations after years when it seemed all but hopeless. What chance, sceptics scoffed, did playwrights and rock musicians have against the might of the Warsaw Pact? How could their friends, mostly a few eccentrics in Paris, Oxford and London, melt the glacial certainties of the Cold War? When I lived in communist Czechoslovakia a decade later, my dissident friends—who had watched the play on smuggled recordings—still cited it as an emblem of cultural solidarity and as an epitome of Britain’s admirably audacious creativity. The West was mired in self-doubt in the 1970s, beset by disunity, geopolitical failure, economic woes and political upheavals (sounds familiar?). Professional Foul was a reminder that some other things, exemplified by Stoppard’s genius, ultimately matter more.
The play also inspired real-life bravery. My father, the late JR Lucas, was one of many Oxford philosophers who, in the following years, risked their own freedom to help their beleaguered Czechoslovak counterparts. Like Pavel Holler, a central character in Stoppard’s play, these people, once the country’s intellectual elite, had been stripped of their academic posts and consigned to manual work. My father lectured to them on Plato in a crowded hospital boiler-room in 1981.
Only eight years later, Václav Havel, the much-jailed playwright to whom Stoppard dedicated Professional Foul, became president of Czechoslovakia. I do wish that Stoppard had lived to write one more work, about Vladimir Putin’s sudden downfall. Miracles do happen when people like him inspire us.
Edward Lucas is a Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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