In the mid-seventies, the Plastic People of the Universe were the most dangerous — and endangered — rock band in the world. Formed in 1968 in Prague, in the former Czechoslovakia, then under communist rule, the Plastic People played raw, confrontational songs about free expression and spiritual exploration, influenced by the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, driving the Czech regime to vicious extremes. The group was banned from performing; fans were attacked by police; band members and associates were imprisoned.

Three decades later, the Plastic People are stars on Broadway — leading off-stage characters in Rock 'n' Roll, the perfectly titled play by British dramatist Tom Stoppard, now at New York's Bernard B. Jacobs Theater through March 2nd. (Extra shows may be added to make up for those canceled during the recent stagehands' strike.) Emotionally raw and historically detailed, Rock 'n' Roll is Stoppard's account of the agonies and hard-won ecstasies leading to the 1989 Velvet Revolution in the now-democratic Czech Republic. The latest in his long line of award-winning dramas, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974) and The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll is also about the stubborn saving grace of music. For the Plastic People, still performing today, the only thing worse than persecution was giving up.

"I read an old interview with Milan Hlavsa," says Stoppard, 70, referring to the Plastics' founding bassist, in a New York hotel room a few days before Rock 'n' Roll's opening night, "in which he said he just wanted to be rich and famous. I responded favorably to that. I loved him just being in love with music."

In Rock 'n' Roll — which premiered in London last year and is on Broadway with its original sterling British cast — that same love drives Jan, a Czech émigré, music freak and prize student of Max, a blustery Cambridge University professor and slowly disillusioned socialist. When Jan (played with quiet, concentrated fire by film star Rufus Sewell) returns to Czechoslovakia and becomes a follower of the Plastic People, he and his treasured collection of Western-rock albums are targeted by the secret police, with grim consequences for Jan and his LPs.

The late Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett is also a hovering presence throughout Rock 'n' Roll, referred to by name and briefly seen as a flute-playing Pan. "I had this idea for a play about a rock star living in the most suburban environment you can imagine," Stoppard explains. Instead, he used Barrett's real-life retreat from acid-damaged stardom to anonymity in Cambridge to echo the Plastics' war with authority. In music as well as politics, Stoppard notes, "Dissidence is saying 'no.' " Ironically, Barrett died a few weeks after Rock 'n' Roll's London debut. Nor did Hlavsa live to see the play. He died in 2001.

There is no singing or dancing onstage in Rock 'n' Roll. But there is music. Cannon bursts of original recordings by Barrett, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Doors and the post-Barrett Floyd, among others, literally amplify the action at each scene change. "Jan's record collection is really Tom's collection," says Rock 'n' Roll's director, Trevor Nunn. "Many of the songs were in the play when I first read it."

"I was quite cavalier — I used songs I liked most," Stoppard claims, grinning. A warm, energetic man with a ready laugh, he can, like Jan, digress at length on his rock & roll passions, such as the Who's Tommy ("a huge album in my life") and the "much-derided" Floyd record The Final Cut.

Also, like Jan, Stoppard is Czech. Born Tomás Straussler in 1937, he left Czechoslovakia with his family on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1939. After the war, his widowed mother remarried and moved to England, where Stoppard was schooled. Rock 'n' Roll is partly, he admits, "a pseudo-autobiography of my life if my mother hadn't married Mr. Stoppard and I'd ended up back in Czechoslovakia." Stoppard returned in 1977 to meet dissident artists, including playwright Václav Havel. But Stoppard did not see Havel's friends the Plastic People on that trip: "I don't remember even asking to interview them. Thinking back, it was a lost opportunity."

Rock 'n' Roll is not. Funny, blunt and absolutely true to its title, it is a living-history lesson, with references to actual events such as Barrett's final concert, in 1972, and a clandestine Plastics gig in 1977. "The play has this little secret," Stoppard says. "Some of it is not fiction at all" — a point dramatically illustrated, he notes, at Rock 'n' Roll's premiere in Prague last year. "At the end, the stage rose slowly into the air, revealing the Plastic People playing live underneath. It was mind-blowing."

[From Issue 1042/1043 — January 10, 2008]