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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2016

Kelly Hanson
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Extract

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.

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Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 358 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

Endnotes

1. A note on grammar and usage: I have chosen to refer to the Plastic People with plural pronouns. I use “they,” “them,” and “their” because these words connote subjectivity, choice, and agency more overtly than “it” or “its.” These plural pronouns mark the band as a group of human actors.

2. Here, I use Sarah Thornton's neologism “subcultural capital” to describe familiarity with musical subcultures or underground musicians as a sign of “hipness” rather than as a result of personal taste. See Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).

3. Tom Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll: A New Play (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), 12.

4. J. Gabriel Boylan, “Tom Stoppard's Shlock-n-Roll,” The Nation, 26 February 2008, www.thenation.com/article/tom-stoppards-schlock-n-roll, accessed 13 January 2012.

5. Tom Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll, directed by Trevor Nunn, featuring Dominic West, David Calder, and Emma Fielding. The live performance I refer to throughout this article is Trevor Nunn's 2006–7 adaptation at the Duke of York's Theatre in London, England. I was present at the performance on 27 February 2007.

6. David Fricke, “On the Edge,” Rolling Stone, 15 April 1999, 109. See Pareles's articles about the Plastic People: “Prague Rock in a Benefit for Prisoner,” New York Times, 27 January 1989, C21; “Czechoslovak Band That Suffered for Its Art,” New York Times, 24 April 1989, C13; “Up from the Underground, Pulnoc Plays at P.S. 122,” New York Times, 27 April 1989, C15; “Rock from Underground,” New York Times, 16 July 1989, H24; “Rock Music of Eastern Europe: So Western, So Familiar, So Old,” New York Times, 28 February 1990, C13; “A New Role for Rock: Fighting Back,” New York Times, 8 July 1990, H24; and, regarding the band's performances in Stoppard's play, “Rock ‘n’ Revolution” New York Times, 11 November 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/arts/music/11pare.html?_r=0&hp=&pagewanted=all, accessed 3 April 2012.

7. Jonathon Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

8. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.

9. Philip Auslander's groundbreaking study Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) was one of the first critical studies to examine music from the perspective of theatricality and performance studies. In the decade since its release, however, relatively few subsequent studies have focused on musical performance, especially in relation to popular music. Nicolas Cook and Richard Pettengill see this gap as primarily a result of the divergent methodologies of performance studies and musicology. Their recent edited collection, Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), brings together performance studies critics and musicologists in an attempt to bridge this gap.

10. Nicolas Cook and Richard Pettengill, “Introduction,” in Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance, 1–19, at 8.

11. Ibid., 9.

12. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6.

13. Bernstein, Robin, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27.4 (Winter 2009): 67–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 89.

14. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 5.

15. Milan Hlavsa, interview by Richie Unterberger, via email, early 1997, trans. Michal Stasa, RichieUnterberger.com, www.richieunterberger.com/hlavsa.html, accessed 19 October 2010.

16. The Prague Spring offered a series of political, economic, and cultural reforms that aimed to revitalize Czechoslovakia. Proposing “socialism with a human face,” the Communist Party attempted to instill sweeping reforms under their new leader, Alexander Dubček. Many of these reforms came to a screeching halt when the Soviet Union sent tanks and troops into Czechoslovakia in mid-1968. Gustáv Husák replaced Dubček as leader of the Communist Party in April 1969, enacting censorship laws and attempting to “normalize” the country by undoing many of the Dubček-era reforms.

17. The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Jaroslav Riedel, trans. Olga Záhorbenska et al. (Prague: Globus Music and Mat'a, 1999), 17.

18. Tom Stoppard, “Tom Stoppard: Did Plastic People of the Universe Topple Communism?” The Times (London), 19 December 2009, www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/music/article2418000.ece, accessed 28 December 2014.

19. For a more in-depth historical take on the politics of Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the early 1990s, including the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Velvet Revolution in 1989, see Sharon L. Wolchik, Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics, and Society (London: Pinter, 1991). For a detailed history of the Plastic People of the Universe in relation to Czechoslovakian politics, see Bolton, Worlds of Dissent.

20. Milan Hlavsa, interview by Jason Gross, November 1998, Perfect Sound Forever, www.furious.com/perfect/plasticpeople.html, accessed 19 October 2010.

21. Pareles, “Rock from Underground.”

22. Pareles, “A New Role for Rock.”

23. Pareles, “Prague Rock in a Benefit for Prisoner.”

24. Ibid.

25. Pareles, “Czechoslovak Band that Suffered for Its Art.”

26. Egon Bondy, “Foreword,” in The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Riedel, 13–14, at 13.

27. Pareles, “So Western, So Familiar, So Old.”

28. Fricke, “On the Edge,” 109.

29. David Fricke, “Syd Barrett, Plastic People Hit Broadway,” Rolling Stone, 27 December 2007, 26.

30. Scholars Sabrina Petra Ramet and Timothy Ryback argue that rock music had a revolutionary effect in the context of Eastern Europe under the Iron Curtain. Ramet claims that rock music served as an inherently political art that mobilized the masses against repressive communist regimes. See Ramet, “Rock Music in Czechoslovakia,” in Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 55–72; and Timothy W. Ryback, Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

31. František Vaněček, “One Hundred Points (100 bodů),” trans. Jan Jonák, in The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Riedel, 73–5, at 75.

32. Brabenec quoted in Pareles, “Prague Rock in a Benefit for Prisoner.”

33. Josef Janíček quoted in Dan Bileksky, “Czechs’ Velvet Revolution Paved by Plastic People,” New York Times, 16 November 2009, A10.

34. Martin Machovec, “Czech Underground Literature, 1969–1989: A Challenge to Textual Studies,” in Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, ed. Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle, and Peter Shillingsburg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 345–58, at 345.

35. There are several different versions of Jirous's original 1975 article, which was originally written and distributed as samizdat. I quote here from an English excerpt published in 1983. See Vratislav Brabenec (interview) and Ivan Jirous (article), “Banned in Bohemia,” Index on Censorship 12.1 (1983): 30–4Google Scholar, at 33. For an official version of this passage in the original Czech, please see Ivan Jirous, “Zpráva o třetím českém hudebním obrození,” in Magorův zápisník (Prague: Torst, 1997), 171–98, at 197.

36. Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 23.

37. For more detailed histories of the Plastic People of the Universe in relation to Czech policy and political history, see Bolton; Ramet; Ryback; and Jaroslav Riedel, “The Plastic People Chronology,” in The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Riedel, 15–25. For more on the music of the Plastic People of the Universe, see Machovec, Martin, “Czech Underground Music in Search of Art Innovation,” East Central Europe 38.2–3 (2011): 221–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Tony, “Mixing Pop and Politics: Rock Music in Czechoslovakia before and after the Velvet Revolution,” Popular Music 11.2 (1992): 187–203 Google Scholar; and Skilling, Gordon H., “Charter 77 and the Musical Underground,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 22.1 (1980): 1–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Hlavsa, interview by Unterberger.

39. The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Verve, 1967.

40. Rolling Stone, “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” Rolling Stone, 31 May 2012, www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-velvet-underground-and-nico-the-velvet-underground-20120524, accessed 5 December 2014; and Timothy Jacobs, “Review of The Velvet Underground and Nico,” in All Yesterdays’ Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print: 1966–1971, ed. Clinton Heylin (Cambridge: De Capo Press, 2005), 51–2, at 52.

41. Jacobs, 51.

42. Hlavsa, interview by Unterberger.

43. Ivan Martin Jirous, “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love,” in The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Riedel, 11–12, at 12. The original Czech reads: “Když Plastici začínali na přelomu let 1968–69, myseleli jsme si ještě, že můžeme obstát v ‘konsolidačním’ dusnu se svým nepolitickým, neangažovaným, mytologikým přístupem k světu, který ‘normalizační’ sed’ pohlcovala rychlosí moru. Nějaký čas jsme měli za to, že můžeme vytvořit svět paralelní, v němž ‘náš mocný národ’ bude žít v sametovém podzemí”; from Jaroslav Riedel, comp., The Plastic People of the Universe: Texty (Praha: Mat'a, 1997), 11.

44. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 110–11, 113.

45. Machovec, “Czech Underground Music,” 228. Ivan Jirous also situated the Plastics as part of the local Czech underground music scene and a larger, international musical counterculture in his article “Banned in Bohemia.”

46. Many thanks to Jess Waggoner for pointing me to the term “antimastery.”

47. Machovec, “Czech Underground Music,” 228.

48. Michal Jernek, “The Sun,” in The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Riedel, 38–9, at 38. The song's title is in English, though the lyrics are originally Czech: “jděte do svých sametových podzemních pavilonů a přijd'te, až znovu nastane noc”; Jernek, “The Sun,” in Riedel, comp., The Plastic People of the Universe: Texty, 36–7, at 36.

49. Michal Jernek, “The Universe Symphony and Melody about the Plastic Doctor,” in The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. Riedel, 32–6, at 33. Frank Zappa also played a seminal role in the Plastic People's music; they even took their name from the 1967 song “Plastic People” by the Mothers of Invention.

50. Jernek, “The Sun,” 38 (English).

51. Richie Unterberger, Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1998), 192.

52. Tomás Pospípil, “Making Music as a Political Act: Or How the Velvet Underground Influenced the Velvet Revolution,” in The Cultural Shuttle: The United States of/in Europe, ed. Véronique Béghain and Marc Chénetier (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 249–56, at 252.

53. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2.

54. Jirous, “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love,” 11.

55. Roach, 2.

56. Ibid., 3.

57. Dolan, 5.

58. Ibid., 8.

59. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 3, 22.

60. Dolan, 5.

61. Hunter, Jefferson, “Sappho, Catullus, Vera Lynn, Pink Floyd, and Tom Stoppard,” Yale Review 98.2 (2010): 128–44Google Scholar, at 144.

62. Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll, 27.

63. Ibid., 30, 34.

64. These conservative politics also crop up in The Coast of Utopia. Roberta Barker notes that “where Stoppard's heroes sought social transformation, he gives them repetition,” producing a temporality in his trilogy that neutralizes the radical politics the characters espouse. See Barker, Roberta, “The Circle Game: Gender, Time, and ‘Revolution’ in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia,” Modern Drama 48.4 (2005): 706–25Google Scholar, at 722.

65. Paweł Schreiber, “East Meets West: From Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul to Rock ‘n’ Roll,” in Conflict, Memory Transfers, and the Reshaping of Europe, ed. Helena Gonçalves da Silva et al. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 82–93, at 92.

66. Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll, 7.

67. Stoppard quoted in Pareles, “Rock ‘n’ Revolution.”

68. Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll, 16; The Plastic People of the Universe, “Magické Noci,” recorded in 1974 for Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned (1978), republished on CD by Globus, 2001. Notably, different performances used different songs by the Plastic People, depending on availability and copyright.

69. Pareles “Rock ‘n’ Revolution.”

70. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 135.

71. Meerzon, Yana, “Dancing on the X-Rays: On the Theatre of Memory, Counter-Memory, and Postmemory in the Post-1989 East-European Context,” Modern Drama 54.4 (2011): 479–510 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 490.

72. Syd Barrett, “Golden Hair,” recorded in 1969 for The Madcap Laughs (1970) by Capitol.

73. Pink Floyd, “Astronomy Domine,” recorded in 1967 for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Capitol.

74. This echo effect was achieved by playing the lead guitar through a Binson echo machine. Thanks to Chris Clements for a fruitful discussion about guitar techniques in this song.

75. Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby, “Introduction,” in Goth: Undead Subculture, ed. Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–37, at 27.

76. Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll, 36.

77. For an extended study of Stoppard's move toward realism over the course of his career, see Daniel Keith Jernigan, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).

78. Innes, Christopher, “Towards a Post-Millennial Mainstream? Documents of the Times,” Modern Drama 50.3 (2007): 435–52Google Scholar, at 435. Recently this historical approach has been applied to many of Stoppard's plays. See Bhatia, Nandi, “Reinventing India through ‘A quite witty pastiche’: Reading Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink,” Modern Drama 52.2 (2009): 220–37Google Scholar; and Innes, Christopher, “Allegories from the Past: Stoppard's Uses of History,” Modern Drama 49.2 (2006): 223–37Google Scholar.

79. See Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber & Faber, 1993); Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1998); and Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage (New York: Grove Press, 2007).

80. Nadel, Ira, “Tom Stoppard and the Invention of Biography,” Modern Drama 43.2 (2000): 157–70Google Scholar, at 161.

81. See Rocamora, Carol, “The Parallel Worlds of Rock ‘n’ Roll, ” American Theater 23.8 (2006): 122, 124–7Google Scholar, at 122; and Benedict, David, “Stoppard Offers a Crash Course in Czech History,” Variety 403.5 (19 June–25 July 2006): 45 Google Scholar, 49.

82. Nunn quoted in Benedict, David, “‘Roll’ Rocks Royal,” Variety 403.4 (12–18 June 2006): 47 Google Scholar.

83. Stoppard quoted in Gwen Orel, “Czechs and Balances: Tom Stoppard Readies Rock ‘n’ Roll for Broadway,” Back Stage (National Edition), 8–14 November 2007, 10.

84. Benedict, “‘Roll’ Rocks Royal.”

85. Cox, Gordon, “Stoppard's on a Gotham ‘Roll,’” Variety 408.10 (22 October 2007): 47 Google Scholar.

86. Ibid.

87. Fricke, “Syd Barrett, Plastic People,” 26.

88. Lahr, John, “The Critics: The Theatre: Czechs and Balances,” New Yorker 82.22 (24 July 2006): 78 Google Scholar.

89. Terry Teachout, “Stoppard Is Back on Broadway,” Wall Street Journal, 6 November 2007, D6.

90. Roach, 2.

91. See Taylor, 1–52. My own reading of Rock ‘n’ Roll as an archive of alternative performance histories builds on Shane Vogel's discussion of writers who “recorded and documented queer time and space in ways that both eluded official transcription and cultivated queer narratives and lifeworlds.” See Vogel, The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 107.