In the Mix

There’s a heartbreaking scene at the end of Act One of Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll, which winds up its theatrical run at the Wilma Theater on Sunday. Jan, the Czech dissident intellectual and Plastic People of the Universe fan, played by Barnaby Carpenter, comes home from prison in 1976 to find that his most prized possession – his record collection – has been smashed into pieces on the floor.

Ouch. That hurts us almost as much as it does Jan, a true believer in the power of music to foster the passion for free expression that the Soviet-era totalitarian regime so despised because they understood, as Paul Wilson, the former Plastic People member said to me last weekend over a cup of coffee in Center City, that “the revolutionary effect of rock and roll is in the mind. That’s where it starts.”

Being Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll is a rich argument of ideas - about cold war politics, the nature of consciousness, the romance of socialism and the biology of the human soul. And it’s also the ode of a rock fanboy - that would be Stoppard - to the music he loves with a Rolling Stones-Pink Floyd-Velvet Undergound soundtrack whose staging by former Czech dissident Blanka Zizka possesses a more “interior authenticity” as Wilson puts it, than the original 2006 production both he and I saw in London in 2006.

(One thing that was better about the London cast I saw, though: it included the devilish Dominic West – that’s Detective Jimmy McNulty to you Wire fans – as a far more charismatic Jan than Carpenter’s.)

The real musical – and political – stars of Rock 'n’ Roll, though, are the Plastic People (that's them looking suitably hippieish, above), the Czech group who Wilson, a Canadian who has just translated author and, after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Czech president, Vaclav Havel’s memoir To The Castle And Back into English, sang with in the early ‘70s.

That's Wilson, who flew into town from Toronto to take part in a Rock 'n' Roll panel discussion with my erstwhile colleagues Carlin Romano and Trudy Rubin, taking a break from his latte, below.

For reasons I don't quite understand, the music of the Plastics - who took their name from a Frank Zappa song and were one of the thousands of mythical bands formed after hearing The Velvet Undergound & Nico (that's the banana album) - which tends to combine Velvets-style drones with excursions into free jazz, isn’t heard in the play. (There is plenty of Syd Barrett, though: seeing a picture of the late former Floyd frontman riding his bike down the street in Cambridge, England was the inspirational spark that got Stoppard’s juices flowing to write Rock 'n' Roll.)

The Plastics are the stuff of legend because even though they were never a really a political band, the refusal of their members or their Andy Warhol-John Sinclair style ringleader Ivan Jirous to buckle to the repressive regime led the Czech secret police to be "obsessed" with them, says Wilson. "We didn’t fight against the political power," Plastic person Vrata Brabanec said in 2006. "We just wanted to do what we liked doing. Because the state didn’t allow us to, the whole thing turned political. We weren’t a political band at all, we wanted to make music. We looked for new poetry and tried to live a free existence. That’s all.”

But as Rock 'N' Roll dramatizes, it was the arrest of band and their followers in 1976 that led Havel, then an internationally known playwright who bore a long haired resemblance to Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, to write the Charter 77 manifesto that grew into the opposition that eventually brought down the Communist regime. So though the Plastics' rock-star singer Milan Hlavsa, who died in 2001, only wanted to play his music and grow his hair, his band wound up having a far more legitimately "revolutionary" effect than the self-styled pop music rebels who inspired them.

In Rock 'n' Roll, Jan believes in the power of the Plastics' defiance of the state. That faith makes him seem naive when his position as a university instructor is taken away, and he's arrested, and all of his records are smashed. But it makes him seem prescient when the regime eventually falls and the Rolling Stones come to play in Prague in 1990 at the request of Havel, evidence, in Jan's eyes, that "life has become amazing."

But even before that happens in Stoppard's play, when life doesn't seem so amazing as Jan's vinyl lay shattered in pieces, music points towards a way to at least dream about a less repressive future. Jan's friend Ferdinand shows up to solicit signatures for a protest petition, and return a borrowed record that's still in one piece: The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. He offers his condolences for all the lost music. Jan tells him not to worry, because, after all, "it's only rock and roll." And then Stoppard tells us he knows it's really much more than that, by having Jan drop the needle on Brian Wilson dreaming of a better world on "Wouldn't It Be Nice."

The Plastics' music can he heard here. And purchased here.

And here's the Beach Boys.