Brian Cox on Tom Stoppard’s rousing rock ‘n’ roll song: ‘I looked through the curtain and saw Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel’ | stage

forBy the time I got into Rock’n’Roll in 2006, I had been following Tom for years. I saw the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when it came to London in 1967 with the great Graham Crowden as the player-king. It was a sensation. The Real Thing was a great play and Arcadia was exceptional.

Set at the Royal Court in London, Rock and Roll was directed by Trevor Nunn and starred Rufus Sewell as Jan, a Czech student who returns to Prague in 1968. She played Max, a Marxist academic. It was a great experience, because there were two plays there: a play about Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, and a play about the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia.

It was a statement of what Tom believed. In it he talked about Plastic Universe People, a real-life Czech band that was banned by the communist government even though they did not consider themselves political. I’ve heard that before, when I went to Russia in the 1980s to work with students at the Moscow Art Theater School. There was a young actor called Ravil Isyanov, unfortunately he is no longer with us, and people thought he was a KGB boy. He wasn’t: the problem was that he loved the Beatles. All his mates were skeptical about this Beatles thing and I just thought, no, the guy has a good sense of music.

What distinguished Tom as a writer were his clear and purposeful ideas. He knew his purpose in everything he wrote and it was not possible to deviate from that. Max was based on Eric Hobsbawm, the great Marxist thinker, but ideas were more important to Tom than personality. I said to him, “Why am I sitting here listening to a lecture on Syd Barrett if I’m quoting Eric Hobsbawm? Why am I here?” He said: Because you are.

It was that simple and you couldn’t go any further. He was great at putting you in a corner where you couldn’t argue anymore. Yet there was no cruelty in him. He was always charming.

We had such a wonderful first night. Attendees included Vaclav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia; Timothy Garton Ash, historian. And Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd. I remember looking through the curtain and seeing Mick Jagger being spoon-fed by his girlfriend. Audiences loved it and it performed well critically. Then New York audiences loved it too. Tom truly understood what the audience needed without giving up. He was very smart that way.

Although born in the former Czechoslovakia, he was quintessentially English and very proper, almost upper class in his manner. My wife, Nicole Ansari, was also in the show, playing Lenka, the Czech student. One day, we were stopping near the Royal Court when we saw Tom, two cars away. He had been sitting in his car for a while and we were a little worried about him: “Should we say anything?”

We went up and knocked on the door and said, “Tom, are you okay?” He said: Yes, I’m fine, why? We said: We are surprised that you have been sitting here for a while.

He said, “Okay, I’m waiting for the timer to go to 12 noon because I got here a little early and then I’ll deposit my coin and we can move on.”

I said: Why? “Boy, it’s all about style,” he said.

He was a man who believed in elegance. It was about choosing your moment. He was an amazing man.