Max is an authentic product of the old Communist Party, as it was before anyone had heard of Eurocommunism – a creed which, when it emerges, earns Max’s utter contempt. “Mail order communism” he calls it.  He tells Jan: “For you freedom means leave us alone.  For the masses it means give us a chance.”  Neither man sees that true freedom must mean both these things.

I suspect the early Stoppard would have felt that Max’s idealism was either wilfully blind, or perhaps something worse.  By 2006, when he wrote Rock ‘n Roll, he was ready to give the man a chance.  “I have a lot of feeling for Max’s version of integrity” he writes in the programme. 

He mentions Max alongside the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who stayed in the Communist Party when most of the other historians were deserting it.  Max isn’t based on Hobsbawm, whom Stoppard got to know only when Hobsbawm was an old man (he died in 2012, aged 95) but Stoppard found Hobsbawm “a decent man” who had nevertheless “found  some way to stick with the core belief he picked up when he was twenty, despite it leading to horrible consequences for huge numbers of people.”

The story concerns three generations of Max’s family, and Jan’s struggle as a Czech dissident who loves rock ‘n roll. Stoppard likes to think of it as hanging on a love story, rather than “editorialising about Marxism and democracy and so on” but there is a lot of editorialising in it.  It’s nonetheless a thoughtful, absorbing play, with several shafts of the incisive wit that are such a feature of Stoppard’s writing.