Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul

Professional Foul by Tom Stoppard is a play about a group of professors from Oxford fly to Czechoslovakia to give speeches and come across catastrophe theory, police corruption, ethic boundaries, and the oppression of human rights. The title, Professional Foul, comes from a football term, which Anderson mentions while watching a football game. It was the least shocking play I've read for this class so far, but it was a very deep read with relatable issues. I liked how each of the professors represented one of the issues by their field.
Anderson is a language professor and he deals with most issues in the play, as he is the main character. He struggles with the local government, foreign languages and policies, and good and bad ethics. He faces moral dilemmas of helping his former student or following the laws and regulations of the foreign country. After he goes through all of his struggles while in Czechoslovakia, he gives a speech about "the conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of the community," and to prove his point, the chairman of the convention stops his speech with fake fire drill.
Pavel Hollar is Anderson's old student at Oxford, who is back in his own country workings as a "cleaner at the bus station." He should be able to get a better job, but can't, since he "walked across a minefield" to an enemy state, Britain. Hollar's thesis is "about correct behavior," which Anderson says is "rather slanderous from the state's point of view." After Hollar gives his thesis, Anderson says "I hope you're not getting me into trouble." Little does Anderson know it is the just the start. We know the police are corrupt since they plant American dollars in his apartment and go through his belongings, especially his books, for twenty hours. The searchers reminded me of Nazis and the firemen from the book, Fahrenheit 451.

Chetwyn is an ethics professor. We don't know whether he believes in what he teaches, because he is caught at the airport trying to return to Britain with a bunch of suspicious letters to other countries. Anderson brushes Chetwyn's arrest and detainment off, saying, "they couldn't treat Chetwyn as though he were a Czech national anyway," which is good for Chetwyn, based on the treatment of Hollar and his family throughout the play.

McKendrick is a politics professor and is a Marxist, with no apologies for what the Marxists have done in the past. He tells us his teaching and research field is the "philosophical assumptions of social science" and he also makes it know he hates football which gets him into trouble with the others. He seems paranoid about everything during his visit and says when they arrive at the hotel, "Do you think the rooms are bugged?"

We are introduced to catastrophe theory by McKendrick during his speech, which suggests morality and immorality "are two lines on the same plane," which makes a lot of sense since there is a grey matter with every dark and light in every decision. After Anderson plants Hollar's thesis in McKendrick's suitcase and McKendrick seems angry by this, calling him an "Utter Bastard" Why does he seem so surprised?

Anderson's theory on ethics is "The difficulty arises when one asks oneself how the individual ethic can have meaning by itself." He tells the cops who are searching Hollar's place, "I assume it is not illegal" if he brings Hollar's papers to read, showing he has a twisted sense of humor. The author, Tom Stoppard makes the play go full circle by starting and ending their journey on the plane, with the characters arriving with hope and leaving with shock. Anderson has the last line of the play, saying, "Ethics is a very complicated business." Indeed it is.