When the long-haired, politically apathetic Czech rock group the Plastic People of the Universe were arrested in 1977 by the country's hard-line communist government, Vaclav Havel, then a dissident playwright, worried he would be unable to muster much support for the group among the underground intelligentsia. "He thought it would be easier if the band were also philosophers and intellectuals," says Tom Stoppard, whose new play "Rock'N'Roll," which opens in London's West End this week, was inspired by the incident.
Over the years, the prolific and political playwright has regularly dipped into the dissident articles penned by Havel, now a close friend. From them he discovered that Havel's fears for the band were unfounded. In fact, the arrest of these gangly youths triggered the drafting of Charter 77, the manifesto criticizing Czechoslovakia's hard-line leaders, whose signatories guided the country's first post-communist government. Discovering this link was "a watershed," says Stoppard, who was born in Czechoslovakia. "These highbrow friends with their clever books understood instantly that this time it was serious. The people on trial were not dissidents. They just wanted to play rock and roll." And this paradox--that musicians who cared nothing for politics could be perceived as the greatest threat to the establishment--forms the vibrant core of his rich new work.
Stoppard's play, only the second he has written about his native country, was also fired by a personal quest. For some time, he says, he had thought of writing a "fake autobiography," set in a parallel world he returns to after World War II instead of settling in England, where he landed as an 8-year-old in 1946. Back then, his mother was determined to forget the past, concerned that Stoppard and his older brother would be hampered by their foreignness. It was only after her death in 1996 that Stoppard, then 59, began exploring his roots. "I've always been curious about how I would have reacted had I been living [in Czechoslovakia] during those years," he says. "I have no idea whether I would have stuck my head above the parapet or not."
His fictional alter ego in "Rock'N'Roll," Jan, played by a captivating Rufus Sewell, has no such qualms. A callow Czech Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge, Jan abandons his studies and heads for Prague in 1968 to support the liberal reforms of communist leader Alexander Dubcek, even as the worried Soviets are amassing tanks on the border. Jan remains cheerfully oblivious to the increasing repression, as reformers all around him are purged and imprisoned. He refuses to sign the petitions of his dissident friend Ferdinand. "I came back to save rock'n'roll," says Jan, a diehard fan of the Plastic People of the Universe. "And my mother," he adds after a moment.
What begins as a meditation on dissidence turns into a thoughtful and witty exploration of the nature of consciousness. Jan leaves behind Max Morrow, his fusty old Marxist tutor in Cambridge, who believes consciousness is created by economics: get the latter right, and the former will fall into place. The play cleverly links this old-fashioned Marxist idea with the disturbing modern trend of equating the physical structures of the brain with the mind. "Inspiration doesn't exist ... except as so many neuron-firings whizzing about the cortex," Max savagely tells his wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack).
Except, Stoppard makes abundantly clear, it does. As Eleanor battles a recurring cancer, she berates Max harshly for treating her as if her mind is as ruined as her body. "I am not my body," she roars at him in one painful scene. "My body is nothing without me, that's the truth of it."
Stoppard uses music to sharp effect, depicting a world increasingly aware of the power of individual consciousness to shape societies. The Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man," for instance, conjures up the Vietnam protests taking place offstage. At the beginning of the play, Pan--the tempestuous Greek god known for his wild music--appears to Max's off-the-rails hippie daughter, Esme. He is a thinly disguised Syd Barrett, the self-destructive Pink Floyd frontman who died earlier this month. The golden boy of late-'60s psychedelia and once a friend of Stoppard's, Barrett was ousted from the band in 1968 as his drug use spiraled out of control. Too much freedom can be as harmful as too little, the play suggests, and some depths of creativity should be left to the gods.
These disparate strands are sewn together brilliantly in Stoppard's tight, tense drama. Jan's apathetic attitude to authority is revealed as less naive than it first appears. For him and his idols, the Plastic People of the Universe, protest is about small, individual acts of rebellion: not getting a haircut, refusing to alter song lyrics. Stoppard deftly narrows the gap between pop artists and intellectuals, high and low culture--a distinction Havel also explored in his influential 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless," in which he stressed the significance of seemingly small individual choices in combating a totalitarian regime.
Stoppard is a master architect of language and ideas. In the play, theory falls away and words lose their meaning when they become twisted for political ends. In an overt criticism of current British and U.S. policies, Jan says, "Giving new meanings to words is how socialism in Czechoslovakia lied to itself ... After that an invasion by foreign armies could become fraternal assistance." Stoppard has delved deep into his passion for music and his own conflicted past to reveal that there is a raw truth in art and individual expression that goes beyond fickle words, so abused to political ends. These twin forces ignite his new play, bringing vividly to life this timely and sharp exploration of rebellion, consciousness and truth.