Tom Stoppard’s eagerly-awaited latest work,  “Rock ‘n Roll,” is a fascinating picture of a young man, Jan, caught up in the tumultuous years from 1968 to 1990 in  Czechoslovakia, from the invasion of Soviet troops to their withdrawal.  Brilliantly interpreted by Rufus Sewell, Jan is the man Czech-born, English-educated Stoppard might have been had he remained in the country of his birth.  As events move from Cambridge to Prague, where Jan returns in  l968, short scenes are bridged by brief musical selections from such groups as Pink Floyd, Velvet Underground, and the Rolling Stones, whose revolutionary music symbolized the times.

 Jan’s favorite Czech rock ‘n roll group is the Plastic People of the Universe, who became a symbol of resistance to the Communist regime.  The group, notes Stoppard, were never political; “They wanted to be appreciated for their work.”  The fact that they neither cooperated with nor condemned the regime enraged the rulers, who finally put them on trial in 1976.  This sparked protests that led to Charter 77, drawn up by Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer who became President of the Republic in 1989.

Stoppard gives us several layers of meaning, although the plot is deceptively simple.   In Cambridge, Jan’s tutor Max is a devout Communist, who holds onto his views despite the actions of the Soviets.  On Jan’s return to Czechoslovakia, his reports are judged inadequate by an interrogator, who chides him for returning with luggage consisting entirely of “socially negative music:” “When our allies answered our call to save socialism in this country, thousands of Czechs and Slovaks who happened to be in the West decided to stay there.  You, on the other hand, whom we requested to stay in Cambridge…you rushed back to Prague.”

The scenes alternate between Jan’s book-and-record-crammed studio in Prague to a family home in Cambridge where reside Max, his wife Eleanor, and their teen-aged daughter Esme, a pot-smoking flower child of the sixties.  The relationship between Esme and Jan is delicately worked out:  over the years she sends him cassettes of his favorite groups and insists that Max, visiting Prague as a Communist dignitary, secure Jan’s release from jail.  After proclaiming his indifference to the regime, Jan is finally incarcerated in 1977 when he signs Charter 77, accusing the Czech government of violating the human rights it had agreed to uphold in the Helsinki Agreement.

While the action in Cambridge is domestic, in Prague it is political, with Jan voicing acceptance at first, and his friend Ferdinand (Peter Sullivan) urging dissent.  Max, as impressively played by Brian Cox, is the curmudgeonly professor we have all known, unbending in his beliefs and belittling those of others.  Yet Max is tender with his wife Eleanor, Sinead Cusack in a heartrending performance of a woman dying of cancer.  In act two, Ms. Cusack is equally effective as grown-up Esme, who married and divorced  journalist Nigel; their clever daughter Alice (Alice Eve) will soon enter Cambridge University.

Combining comedy and conflict is the dinner at which Nigel is to introduce the family to his new wife, Candida, a tabloid writer.   Jan, visiting Cambridge, joins them. Not for the first time, Stoppard offers some ironic reflections on journalists.  (In Prague, Nigel had asked Jan for help on a story on “dissidents,” explaining the difference between a “piece” and a “story.”)

At the dinner party, when the tabloid of the day is brought in, it is discovered to have a “hate’ spread on Syd Barrett, who retreated to Cambridge when addiction caused his dropout from Pink Floyd.  During the dinner, Alice’s boyfriend Stephen lashes into Candida about the story as typically tabloid: “an overheated nonsense, apparently written for people with arrested development, and mindlessly cruel, but totally safe, a sort of triumph….but the oddest thing about it is that the cruelty and the dishonesty are completely unmotivated, it’s just a …a kind of style.”

The final split scene, in 1990,  shows both locales, Prague, with Esme and Jan together “as  lovers” preparing to go to a Rolling Stones concert, and former student Lenka, now Max’s mistress, holding a tutorial in the Cambridge garden, drowned out by noise of  the Plastic People album, ‘Trouble Every Day,’ and then in Prague by the pre-concert noise and the “first guitar chords” of the Rolling Stones’ live album ‘No Security.’ Written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre, the play moved in July to the Duke of York’s Theatre.  (St. Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4BG,  phone: 0870 060 6623)