The Plastic People of the Universe and Utopian Performance in Tom Stoppard's Rock ‘n’ Roll

Abstract

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll revolves around the story of the Plastic People of the Universe (1968–88), an underground Czech rock band best known in the United States for their connections to Václav Havel and possibly for their ties to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern bloc. Often tangentially referred to in progressive Western journalism, the Plastic People have come to signify a kind of subcultural capital for mainstream bourgeois writers, a way for moderate Western liberals to appear edgy and cultured. Stoppard's play draws on this popular consumption of the Plastic People, fetishizing them both for their grungy, underground lifestyle and for their status as underground rock legends. After all, the play seems to ask, how many rock bands can claim to have started an actual revolution? The play's twin narratives dramatize the clash between rock music and philosophical Marxism in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. The stories are linked through the protagonist, Jan, a Czech intellectual who abandons his studies at Cambridge to return to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968. He is determined to “save” rock music, socialism, and his mother. Jan soon discovers the Plastic People of the Universe, whose music he holds up as a positive ray of light in the dreary decades preceding the Velvet Revolution. Placing the Plastics’ music and story alongside the work of male rock megastars such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, Stoppard celebrates the Plastic People as a band that preserves the revolutionary roots of rock music.