From the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution and beyond, Tom Stoppard's compelling musical play takes its audience on a dance through time

If ever there was a drama that delivered what it says on the tin, this is it. Rock ’n’ Roll suffuses the action and not just as background musical motif. The Tom Stoppard show premiered in 2006 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, predating his award-winning 2020 Leopoldstadt, which tells the 20th-century history of a Central-European Jewish family (arguably not unlike Stoppard’s own). The play’s detailed timeline somersaults between the 1960s and 1980s. Specifically 1968, year of the short-lived Prague Spring, when Russian tanks rolled into the city to suppress the bid for democracy in its satellite nation; and 1989, when the Velvet Revolution saw then Czechoslovakia achieve independence from the Soviet Union without major conflict. But this is not an unequivocal paean to independence and democracy. Rather, it is a nuanced ongoing debate between two men, both high-powered intellectuals, representing polarised attitudes to Communism as represented by the Soviet Bloc.

What makes this extraordinarily multifaceted drama worth close attention is the debate, ongoing over decades, between the two protagonists. Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) in 1968 is an idealistic young Czech Cambridge PhD student intent on returning home for the Prague Spring; and Max (Nathaniel Parker), his Marxist professor, sees all that is good in the Soviet ideal. They represent perhaps not only the debate between two iconic Czech writers, optimist Václav Havel and the more pessimistic Milan Kundera, but also Czech-born, passionately Anglophile Brit Stoppard’s own well-informed internal debate, which is influenced by his admiration for Havel, who emerged as the brave and battling Czech leader of the Prague Spring.

The shifts in time are underscored by the rock playlist, beginning with the music of Syd Barrett, co-founder of 1960s psych-rockers Pink Floyd. His plangent track 'Golden Hair’ floats down from a Cambridge garden wall, overheard by teenage Esme (Phoebe Horne), who is enchanted to identify him (Brenock O’Connor) as 'the great God Pan’, the piper at the gates of dawn.

Esme is Max’s daughter with Eleanor, a classics professor who specialises in the female Greek poet Sappho. Eleanor has breast cancer and feistily refuses to wear a false breast to disguise her mastectomy. The versatile Nancy Carroll plays both Eleanor and, in Act Two, 20-something Esme.

The other great musical icons whose aura pervades the action and arguments of the play are the underground Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, who were part of the short-lived liberation of the Prague Spring, but found themselves arrested and on trial for ‘disturbing the peace’ as attitudes hardened through the 70s. Nonetheless, their trial in 1976 exercised Havel to become involved and stand up for those whose freedoms were repressed. This, in turn, led to Charter 77, a public initiative protesting violations by the state against the basic human rights guaranteed by the UN. When Jan returns to Prague, he too finds himself in jail, but for much less obvious subversive behaviour than direct action – for playing the rock CDs he's packed, including The Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground and The Beach Boys.

What impresses here is the assured 20-year sweep of Stoppard’s play, which requires Jan and Max to age by Act Two. The action is back in Cambridge, Max is unwell, his health perhaps undermined by his exasperation at the emergence of the moderate Gorbachev and his big idea: perestroika (restructuring of the Soviet Union).

New generations appear, Esme has a daughter, Alice, and together they invite most of the characters we've already met – and even some newcomers – to lunch. The music, the clashes of opinion and meetings of minds are absorbing and urgent. By the curtain, though some momentum is lost with the sheer amount of what's going on, thanks to director Nina Raine’s clear through-line, the revival is totally compelling.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Manuel Harlan

Rock ’n’ Roll runs until Saturday 27 January. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Thu & Sat only). £10-£35. Hampstead Theatre, NW3 3EU. hampsteadtheatre.com