Professional Foul

Professional Foul is a play written by Czech-born, British playwright Tom Stoppard. It was first published in 1977 and was filmed for BBC television and broadcast in September of the same year. The play is set in Prague and follows the character of Professor Anderson, a Cambridge don, on a weekend visit to a philosophical colloquium. What should be a fairly uneventful trip is complicated by the intervention of the Communist government, leading to an ethical dilemma for the professor of philosophy, a situations explored by Stoppard through the opinions of several characters. The play was written to coincide with Amnesty International's "Prisoners of Conscience Year" and is dedicated to Czech playwright and then political activist Václav Havel whom Stoppard has cited as an influence on his writing. The date of publication and broadcast is also significant in that 1977 was the year in which the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia presented the government with a formal protest against... full article at wikipedia