Listening to the Plastic People of the Universe

Although most famous for their political dissidence, “The Plastic People emerged just as dozens and hundreds of other bands,” bassist Milan Hlavsa remembered. “We just loved rock ‘n’ roll and wanted to be famous.”Footnote ¹⁵ Despite cultural changes associated with the Prague Spring of 1968, rock music in Czechoslovakia during this time fell under censorship laws and strict government regulations of culture.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1970, the band lost their performance license. Deemed “a ‘negative social effect’ on Czechoslovakia's youth,” the Plastic People were unable to perform or practice legally.Footnote ¹⁷ For a few years, the band flew under the radar, skirting censorship laws by performing Velvet Underground songs at art lectures given by singer and band manager Ivan “Magor” Jirous. But for most of the 1970s and 1980s, the Plastic People remained underground, meeting occasionally to play concerts and attempting to outsmart the police, who frequently broke up their gatherings, beat their fans, destroyed their equipment, and chucked band members in jail. After 1981, it became impossible for them to practice or play together at all, and the band dissolved in 1988.Footnote ¹⁸ After their 1976 arrest for performing at a music festival, the Plastic People became a cause célèbre. The international press latched onto the fact that they had been arrested for simply playing music, while more politicized facets of Czech society used the band's plight to bolster resistance to the communist regime. Protests ensued. The band's arrest and public trial inspired the writing of Charter 77, a groundbreaking document accusing the Czechoslovakian government of human rights violations. Charter 77 sparked resistance movements throughout the country, which finally culminated, twelve years later, in the Velvet Revolution. This peaceful, cultural revolution signaled the end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ¹⁹

As a result of this history, most of the Western world has seen the Plastic People as the light of freedom in the darkness of Eastern Europe under communist rule. While visiting the United States in the 1990s, Hlavsa found that “if the audience has heard about the Plastic People, they look at us as a band that was known as being persecuted by the Communists. We can't escape that—we are connected with that.”Footnote ²⁰ Writing for the New York Times, music critic John Pareles frequently cited the band as part of his larger celebration of Soviet-bloc rock for its ability to disrupt communist culture. He saw Eastern Europe as a place where rock music could “liv[e] up to its reputation as rebel music” and presented the Plastic People as rebels fighting communism with music.Footnote ²¹ The band's fans were not motivated by music, Pareles claimed, but were instead inspired by political messages; they “endured police beatings and other reprisals to hear what the band had to say.”Footnote ²² The music became a secondary concern for Pareles, who celebrated the band's cultural-political role as “a rallying point for Czechoslovak artists, intellectuals and human-rights activists.”Footnote ²³ “Band members,” he explained to US audiences unfamiliar with Czechoslovakian politics, “were jailed; the rural farmhouses where they performed were sometimes burned down, sometimes seized by the Government.”Footnote ²⁴ Later, when the band that rose from the ashes of the Plastic People, Pulnoc (Midnight), toured in the United States, Pareles presented them as survivors of the horrors of the communist Eastern Bloc.

Pareles's articles frame the Plastic People as both a “band that suffered for its art” and as the only surviving emblem of free speech in a repressive police state.Footnote ²⁵ To an extent, Pareles's perceptions of the Plastic People and rock music as a genre echo Czech poet Egon Bondy's claim that in communist Czechoslovakia, rock music “still had its initial subversive drive,” whereas “in the West [it] was already losing its original social significance … and becoming only consumer music.”Footnote ²⁶ Like Bondy, Pareles saw rock music as transforming into something revolutionary when it entered Eastern Europe. “Listening to Eastern-bloc rock,” Pareles claimed in 1990, “it often seems that every Western artifact that penetrated the Iron Curtain was equally prized. … Each token of Western culture, no matter how silly or schlocky, was scrutinized, assimilated and passed along, a talisman of freedom and affluence.”Footnote ²⁷ Yet unlike Bondy, who attended to the importance of social context, Pareles seems to frame rock itself as the medium of revolutionary change. As a “talisman of freedom and affluence,” rock music carries with it a magical force of capitalism, free speech, and neoliberal ideas. Even nonrevolutionary elements of rock music—the “silly or schlocky” and the popular or mainstream—offer revolutionary potential precisely because of their relationship to capitalist culture in the West, which Bondy dismissed as rendering rock mere “consumer music.” Pareles celebrated rock music as a revolutionary medium that allowed neoliberal Western values to enter and disrupt Soviet culture; he depicted rock albums as objects that could metonymically convey capitalist values.

David Fricke of Rolling Stone endorsed a similar perspective when he opened a column in 1999 with this dramatic claim: “The Plastic People of the Universe never aspired to martyrdom: they had it forced upon them—during their first lifetime, 1968–87, in the former Czechoslovakia—by a communist regime that believed there was no rock & roll strong enough to withstand official censure, police raids and jail time. The Party was wrong.”Footnote ²⁸ This understanding of the Plastic People informed Fricke's experience when he saw Rock ‘n’ Roll; reviewing the play in 2007, he described it as “about the stubborn saving grace of music,” claiming that music both saves and resists.Footnote ²⁹ Fricke went much further than Pareles: he isolated rock ‘n’ roll from its socioeconomic context and presented the medium of rock music itself as capable of withstanding and disrupting the police state. In Fricke's thesis, rock music seems to contain revolutionary potential a priori. Fricke's and Pareles's popular narratives both position the Plastic People as the band that started a revolution. However, by imagining rock music as an inherently revolutionary mode of music—whether a priori or because of its connections to capitalist culture—they present the Plastic People less as an actual catalyst for cultural change and more as an empty signifier that consolidates myths about the glories of rock music.

Granted, Pareles's and Fricke's emphasis on revolution, struggle, and anticommunist sentiment seems to have some basis in the band's music and history.Footnote ³⁰ After the band members’ arrests and trial in 1976, the Plastic People began to write more overtly political songs. The album 100 bodů, recorded in 1977 and 1978, offered a stark change from previous work. The lyrics are much more political; recounting the recent events of the band, the songs include stories of band members’ arrests, trials, and jail time and the ensuing increase in repression, surveillance, and beatings by the police. The song “One Hundred Points” (“100 bodů”) comprises a list of one hundred things “they”—the government, those in power—fear; the song ends with “them” fearing truth, freedom, democracy, “Human Rights Accords,” and socialism. “So why,” the song queries, “do we fear them?”Footnote ³¹ This overt questioning of authority is an idiosyncratic moment in the Plastics’ oeuvre, but it nevertheless indicates a political message. Less overtly political were the ways the Plastic People codified underground style as a source of strength and power. Long hair, for example, became an increasingly common theme in their lyrics during the late seventies and early eighties. The album Leading Horses (Co znamená vésti koně; 1981) includes “Samson,” a song that metaphorically links the strength the biblical Samson derived from his long locks to the political change the Plastic People could affect by refusing to compromise about their own hair length.

Yet according to the band, these moments that we might easily read as political were not intended as political acts against the communist government. The Plastic People “weren't a political movement,” saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec argued in 1989. “We didn't have any interest in the Communists.”Footnote ³² Keyboardist Josef Janíček summed up their experience: “We were unwilling heroes who just wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll.”Footnote ³³ The band framed their music as a celebration of an alternative, underground culture that refused to recognize the authority of the Czechoslovakian government. In Czechoslovakian culture, critic Martin Machovec notes, “the notion of the underground can be understood in connection with a particular worldview (weltanschauung) or attitude toward life.”Footnote ³⁴ In 1975, Ivan Jirous framed the Plastic People's underground culture in much the same way, arguing that

Jirous's “second culture” was an important concept for the Plastic People. It highlighted the band's commitment to not seeking subversion. Positioned outside the “hierarchy of values laid down by the authorities,” an underground “second culture” does not seek to overthrow the government; instead, it cultivates a cultural space beyond the government's reach. The Plastic People saw the potential of music to create such an alternative world, a phenomenon that cultural critic Josh Kun has usefully termed an “audiotopia.” A utopic space that straddles the sonic, textual, and social spaces of music, an audiotopia “offers the listener and/or the musician new maps for re-imagining the present social world.” For Kun, audiotopias function most directly as a critique of this world. They work as “maps [that] point us to the possible, not the impossible; they lead us not to another world, but back to coping with this one.”Footnote ³⁶

Audiotopias in the Plastic People's music emerge most overtly through allusions to the US rock band the Velvet Underground. Tracing the Plastic People's allusions to the Velvet Underground suggests that the US rock band helped the Plastic People cultivate alternative ways of living during a constrictive historical moment.Footnote ³⁷ Understanding the band's relationship to the Velvet Underground offers us a way to read the origins of the underground culture in which the Plastic People centrally figured and helps reveal a transnational performance culture that infuses the Plastic People's music and live performances. According to Hlavsa, the Plastic People came into existence shortly after he first heard the Velvet Underground's debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, in 1967. What Hlavsa recalled about that moment is worth quoting at length:

Thus while the Velvets were one of many bands that the Plastic People idolized and imitated, it is their album that Hlavsa cited as his band's origin point. Although The Velvet Underground & Nico was not a commercially successful album, it remains the inspiration for countless bands.Footnote ³⁹ Rolling Stone has since put the album at #13 on its “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list, but the few critics who reviewed the album in the 1960s dismissed it as “a full-fledged attack on the ears and brain. … the Velvet Underground attacks, grates, screams, and pounds on the eardrums until the mind is virtually reduced to oatmeal.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Critics claimed that “the message” of the album was “one of perversion, sickness, and turmoil.”Footnote ⁴¹

For the Plastic People, these so-called faults offered a sonic form that reflected their quotidian existence and musical abilities. “I really trusted [the Velvets] and I still do,” Hlavsa mused in the late 1990s. “I know what they did they did from their heart without any calculations; I could immediately identify with their music.”Footnote ⁴² This trust indicates that the Plastic People engaged with the Velvet Underground's music on terms that cannot simply be reduced to listening or influence. Hlavsa's account of the Plastic People's origins relies on a realization that he too could become a musician. Listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico authorized Hlavsa and his friends to become cultural producers because of—not in spite of—their lack of musical training and mastery of their instruments. The Plastic People's relationship with the Velvet Underground relied on a unique, affective listening experience that transcended spatial distances and cultural boundaries and enacted a moment of trust, understanding, and human connection.

Jirous went even further than Hlavsa; he used the Velvet Underground's name to describe and demarcate the Plastic People's underground “second culture.” “When the Plastics started in 1968–69,” Jirous remembered in 1997, “… For some time we thought we would be able to create a parallel world in which ‘our great nation’ would live in a velvet underground.”Footnote ⁴³ Whereas Hlavsa traced the band's genealogy to the Velvet Underground's album, Jirous used the Velvet Underground to imagine an alternative cultural space outside the Czechoslovakian nation-state where the Plastic People could live. The “velvet underground” he described was a cultural space that seems to embody his ideals of the underground's radical “second culture,” one that would be separate from but not directly opposed to the dominant state culture. Rather than imagining what Raymond Williams has called an “alternative hegemony” or “counter-hegemony,” Jirous presented the “velvet underground” as an entirely different “area of lived experience” from the state communist culture.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Plastic People's sonic corpus created Jirous's alternative cultural space by re-creating the sound of the Velvet Underground. The Plastic People's subterranean sound was raw and unvarnished, blending the noisy antimastery of the Velvet Underground with the sounds of contemporary Czech rock bands such as DG 307 and AKTUAL.Footnote ⁴⁵ This antimastery of their instruments celebrated unpolished and undeveloped musical abilities and valued the experience of performing over virtuosic proficiency.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their “wild, spontaneous rock” glorified the pleasurable act of making music and noise, rejecting the unattainable mastery of form and ability of a musician such as Jimi Hendrix.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hlavsa said as much in his stories about listening to the Velvet Underground: the band's music appealed to him and his friends because it did not require them to master their instruments. In some ways, the Plastics’ imperfect musical performance was what allowed them to imagine and perform a utopic underground that was itself imperfect.

Although the Plastics learned to perform by covering Velvet Underground songs and mimicking the US band's stage presence, their early performances also found precedent in the Czech rock scene of their Prague Spring cohort. Through their pastiche of global music sounds, then, the Plastic People sonically performed their “velvet underground,” creating an alternative cultural space within Czechoslovakia, a space separate from official Czechoslovakian culture, where music and performance were infused with the communist state's ideology. In order to perform a sonic space outside the sanctioned state culture, the Plastic People melded American and Czech underground rock, drawing equally on the lyrics of early Velvet Underground staples such as “Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin,” the poetry of the banned Czech poet Egon Bondy, Slavic sounds of the Czech rock tradition, experimental tropes of Western musicians such as Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix, and the darker sounds of their own hoarse instrumentation.

The Plastic People described their audiotopic space as an alternative mode of living that was excessively dark, disgusting, and intimately corporeal. Drugs, alcohol, sex, excrement, and dark images of worlds without light or hope were prevalent tropes in their lyrics, and their sound became increasingly dark and cacophonous over time. They consistently referred to themselves as living in cold, dark spaces that are literally located underground. In the song “The Sun,” for example, the band instructs their followers, “Go back to your velvet underground pavilions / and return with the night,” claiming the Velvet Underground's music as a utopic space in which underground culture can survive. Later, in the same song, the band asserts, “All the stupid brains are in the sun / our great nation lives in velvet underground.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, the English-titled song “The Universe Symphony and Melody about the Plastic Doctor” offers a creation myth for the band by situating the Czech underground in the history of British and American pop-rock artists like The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Frank Zappa.Footnote ⁴⁹ Both songs reference the Velvet Underground throughout. “The Sun” and “The Universe Symphony and Melody about the Plastic Doctor” construct “the velvet underground” as an imaginary, transformative space that is fecund and is capable of producing new cultural experiences defined by US rock music while remaining safely isolated from official Czechoslovakian culture.Footnote ⁵⁰

This imagined space existed within the sound and lyrics of the Plastic People's music, but it found true footing within the ephemeral moments of early live performances in which the band performed covers of Western rock music and often sang in English. At early Plastic People shows, the band “would ‘demonstrate’ Velvet Underground songs” following Jirous's lectures on Andy Warhol.Footnote ⁵¹ In addition to the Velvets’ music, the Plastic People would imitate the band's stage presence in these performances, re-creating the manic lightshows and media bombardment of Warhol's experimental stage show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, in which the Velvet Underground performed.Footnote ⁵² As Rebecca Schneider reminds us, this type of reenactment highlights “the residue of the gesture [and] the cross-temporality of the pose.” Reperformances and reenactments function to disjoint time by producing new performances of the present and, in the process, firmly attaching themselves to the performances of the past. In an “action taking place in or as re-action,” Schneider asks, “what if time (re)turns? What does it drag along with it?” “In the syncopated time of reenactment,” she argues, “then and now punctuate each other” and performers “battle an ‘other’ time and try to bring that time—that prior moment—to the very fingertips of the present.”Footnote ⁵³

Though the Plastic People's “demonstrations” did not explicitly reperform the Velvet Underground's live performances, these demonstrations were more than just simple covers of the Velvet Underground's music. The band invoked manic lights and sounds, imitated the US band's stage presence, and tethered themselves to US rock culture, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and Andy Warhol's artistic legacy. In the process, they also tethered the time and space of these historic performances to their present moment. Through these reperformances, the Plastic People dragged the audiotopic world of the Velvet Underground's music into the time of the Plastic People's live shows. Wedged in the interstices of disjointed time between 1968 Prague and 1967 New York City, the Plastics’ live performances functioned as transnational and transtemporal reperformances.

As the reperformed, audiotopic space of the Velvet Underground's music, the Plastic People's “velvet underground” existed only in the time of clandestine performances that were necessarily momentary and fleeting. After 1973, the Plastic People stopped performing as many covers and began to write and perform songs that contained what Jirous saw as less “naive” themes.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, the band's early performances were undoubtedly animated by a utopic longing for an alternative world that existed first within the music of the Velvet Underground and later appeared within the Plastic People's own music and performances. In live performances of the Velvet Underground's music at Jirous's “art lectures,” this imagined world found solid footing for a few short hours. The transnational and transtemporal nature of these performances took them outside the time and space of the Czechoslovakian nation-state, allowing them to occupy the performatic time and space of the “velvet underground.”

Reperforming the “Velvet Underground”: Rock ‘n’ Roll's Utopic Imaginary

Tom Stoppard evokes this audiotopic space in his 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll through his use of rock music—especially the music of the Plastic People of the Universe—within a darkened theatre. Attending to the ways Stoppard's play uses the Plastic People's music highlights the interplay between textual content and sonic presence in the ephemeral moments of live theatre. The imagined space of the “velvet underground” that once found footing in illicit rock shows survives now only as textual residue in the Plastics’ autobiographical narratives and song lyrics. However, it temporarily resurfaced as a felt and lived space in live productions of Stoppard's play. These shows seem to function as a reperformance of the Plastic People's own reperformance of the Velvet Underground. Rock ‘n’ Roll thus not only offers a way of recuperating the Plastic People from glamorized obscurity but also, and more important, helps the band's audiotopic spaces rematerialize, gesturing toward new cultural imaginaries based in a utopic longing for an alternative future.

In light of this, we might productively read Rock ‘n’ Roll as a cultural “surrogation” of the Plastic People's “velvet underground.” Surrogation, Joseph Roach argues, refers to the ways a “culture reproduces and re-creates itself” through performances that represent an attempt to fill a void within a community—the loss of a life, friend, a memory, an experience, or a history.Footnote ⁵⁵ Performance is a dual attempt “to embody and to replace.”Footnote ⁵⁶ While surrogations necessarily produce an imperfect fit, they serve as an important factor in the transmission and reconstruction of cultural memory and embodied practice. By using the music of the Plastic People in live performances, Nunn's Rock ‘n’ Roll performed a cultural surrogation that both embodied and replaced the audiotopic spaces of the Plastic People's music and underground culture, materializing the imagined cultural space of the band's “velvet underground.”

More than just a surrogation, however, Rock ‘n’ Roll's use of the Plastic People's music in live performances can be productively read as what Jill Dolan calls a utopian performative, a gesture toward moments of collective potential that asks the audience to imagine the world as otherwise than it is.Footnote ⁵⁷ Utopian performatives are “doings” that situate utopia “as process”; they exist “as never finished gestures toward a potentially better future.”Footnote ⁵⁸ If the Plastic People's music functions in a utopic fashion—searching for what José Esteban Muñoz called the “not-yet-conscious” of “utopian feeling” that critiques the present by its insistence on an alternative life and future and by asking the audience to imagine “otherwise”—then Rock ‘n’ Roll doubly reproduces this utopic longing by using the Plastic People's music as a utopian performative.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rock ‘n’ Roll uses recorded music to signify the band's historical underground culture and the Plastic People's longing for a utopian space in their songs. This music transfers and reproduces this utopic longing to Stoppard's audiences, “doing” utopia through rock music. To extend Dolan's thought, in Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Plastic People's music “lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” as when experiencing the performance.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Jefferson Hunter has noted, Rock ‘n’ Roll “entertain[s] the possibility of divine survival and of the continuing usefulness of song, whether piped or accompanied by electric guitars.”Footnote ⁶¹ This possibility becomes a transcendent musical experience in live performances. The play incorporates the Plastic People's music and re-creates their “velvet underground,” thereby inspiring utopic feelings of radical potentiality in Stoppard's audiences.

On the surface of the plot of Rock ‘n’ Roll, this radical performance potential is not immediately evident. Like Pareles, Stoppard positions rock ‘n’ roll as both a neoliberal and a revolutionary medium—revolutionary, in some ways, because it hails from the neoliberal West. This juxtaposition of revolutionary and conservative values at first seems to neutralize the play's radical potential. Stoppard positions the Czech underground as intimately connected to neoliberalism by filtering the Plastic People's narrative through the voice of Jan, a transplanted Czech intellectual who embraces capitalism, free markets, and Western culture. In 1968, Jan abandons his studies at Cambridge and moves back to Prague to fight against the invading Soviet tanks. Dismayed by the violent totalitarianism that marks the next two decades, he celebrates England as an idealized space of freedom, democracy, and progressive thought. “I dream of having what you [the English] invented,” he says to his English friend Max, “trial by jury, independent judges … [and] free speech.”Footnote ⁶² Jan initially latches on to the Plastic People because they are rock musicians and Jan loves rock music, embracing its place in Western culture. As time goes on, however, Jan supports the Plastics because they challenge the repressive government rather than offering the “moral exhibitionism” he sees in the petitions and protest work of his friend Ferdinand, a character based on Václav Havel, whom Jan, following a fictional Ivan Jirous, calls “the ‘official opposition.’”Footnote ⁶³

Given the plot's neoliberal leanings, it may seem strange to read Rock ‘n’ Roll for its connections to radical underground culture, especially when we consider Stoppard's self-proclaimed conservative politics and mainstream position in England as a well-established playwright.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet the play's engagement with the Plastic People requires a more complex approach, asking us to focus on the use of radical music in the performance alongside the play's more conservative narrative. These contrasting pieces are constitutive of each other, for the more conservative aspects of the play's plot helped the Plastic People's utopic underground world to materialize during live performances in London in 2006 and 2007.

Throughout these performances, rock music marked the plot's spatial shifts between two historically significant cities, Cambridge and Prague. Filling the gaps between scene changes, music helped transport audiences from one space (and scene) to another. In this way, rock demarcated the play's spatiotemporal structure and insisted on a spatialized understanding of the plot's development. Such an understanding marks a shift away from the linguistic or temporal-historical model critics usually associate with Stoppard's plays. Paweł Schreiber has highlighted this spatial rift, arguing that the play culminates in a collapse of time and space that “merges” East and West, “the past with the present.”Footnote ⁶⁵ But in live performances, rock music helped clearly define geographic spaces for the audience. Nunn's 2006 production of Rock ‘n’ Roll followed Stoppard's stage directions for blackouts, crashing the theatre into total darkness using a “smash cut” and blasting rock music as a screen descended during a set change.Footnote ⁶⁶ Simple white text was projected on the screen, naming the song, artist, and album. In some cases, these projections included album art. Playing to a darkened theatre as the crew switched the sets, rock music served a utilitarian role, filling time between set changes and underscoring the passage of time between each scene. In this way, music formed the borders between different spaces and historical moments.

Yet these were not impenetrable: Nunn and Stoppard's use of musical interludes to change scenes allowed the audience to move across these barriers of space and time. Rock music served as the medium that transported the audience across time and space as the plot swung, pendular, between Cambridge, England, and Prague, Czechoslovakia, over the course of twenty years. Mirroring Hlavsa's experience of listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico, these musical interludes offered audiences a different way of listening, pushing them beyond any normative consumption of pop music. These acts of listening transcended and overcame spatial and temporal distances, bridging the gap between past and present, near and far. In a theatrical production that infuses music with transformative value, such interludes seem in line with the characters’ glorification of rock ‘n’ roll. Stoppard himself quipped, “The play perhaps could be called ‘It's Not Only Rock ‘n’ Roll,’” for the entire drama seems designed to present rock as something more than just music.Footnote ⁶⁷ But while the transformative potential of the musical interludes derives, in part, from the play's celebration of music, their performatic power eludes such easy classification.

Situated in the interstices of time and space, these musical “smash cuts” exist outside the play's plot, outside the narrative's nationalized spaces of Cambridge and Prague, and outside the story's time. The only time and space they can truly be said to occupy is the space of the theatre and the time of the live performance. As an audience member at a February 2007 performance in London, I felt isolated in the dark space of the cold theatre during these scene changes. The sudden, almost violent, blackout and blast of music transported me to another space entirely—one that was both connected to and separate from the drama happening onstage. As a music fan, I was entranced by the sounds, by the scream of disharmonic guitar chords and the syncopation of songs that seemed so out of sync with the play. The music drowned out all other sound in the theatre, and even as dark shapes moved around the stage to change the scene, the space I inhabited was the space of the music within the dark theatre—or rather the space of the theatre was infused by the sound of the music.

These interstitial moments held the audience in limbo; we moved neither forward nor backward but simply waited in suspension. As the Plastic People's “All Over Now” or “Magické noci” burst into the blackened theatre, the music tore through the fabric of the play, assaulting the senses and thrusting the audience into the present moment.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even as the music helped shift the scenes of the play forward, the musical interludes returned audience members to the present space of the theatre and to the time and sensation of their own listening experience. Suddenly transformed into one of many bodies sitting closely in a packed theatre, these listeners were pulled out of the play's story and returned to their own world that had been changed, perhaps even made spectacular, by the presence of rock music. Defined by cold darkness, raw sound, and the suggestive power of rock music, these “smash cut” music scenes reperformed the Plastic People's “velvet underground,” grating against the audience's theatrical expectations and sonically touching them, perhaps in the same way Hlavsa and his friends found themselves touched by the music of the Velvet Underground. For unfamiliar audiences, the information and images projected on the black screen aided this transformation of theatrical space into audiotopic space.

Perhaps the most literal version of this theatrical transformation through reperformance came with the debut of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Czech Republic in February 2007 at the National Theatre in Prague. At this performance, the Plastic People's remaining members performed live at the beginning and end of the play. This staging of Rock ‘n’ Roll overtly presented the entire play as a cultural surrogation. A dramatic shift from their secret performances, the Plastic People's Rock ‘n’ Roll performance also underscored how much Czech culture and politics had changed in the decades following the Velvet Revolution. “Once, the government would not permit the Plastics to perform in public at all,” John Pareles reflected, “much less at the capital's highbrow showplace.” After Charter 77 was signed in January 1977, the communist government had summoned artists and intellectuals to the National Theatre to force them to sign a document denouncing it.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Plastic People's 2007 performance temporarily transformed this space of official national culture into the utopic underground outside communist culture. Moving beyond the space of the stage into what Antonin Artaud has called “the affective world,” where actors translate meaning and feeling into “material sense,” Rock ‘n’ Roll extended its re-creation to the space of the entire theatre.Footnote ⁷⁰

In productions in London, Prague, and New York, rock music carved out a space of radical potentiality both within the narrative structure of the play and within the space of the theatre. But within the plot, rock music functions in a different way. Rock ‘n’ Roll's characters listen to artists such as Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, the Beach Boys, and the Velvet Underground and discuss them in relation to the Czechoslovakian underground and the Plastic People. As Yana Meerzon notes, “The play discusses the significance of playing and listening to rock ‘n’ roll as an act of passive resistance.”Footnote ⁷¹ The play also explores the significance of consumerism as a form of resistance. In Czechoslovakia, Jan and Ferdinand covet records and treasure Jan's LP collection because these objects allow them to imagine a different world that is Western, liberal, and democratic. In this way, Rock ‘n’ Roll appears to use the Plastics to critique the Soviet bloc and celebrate the West. Jan's experiences in Czechoslovakia reveal increasingly curtailed freedoms and police beatings. In one scene, he returns home to find his beloved records smashed and destroyed on the floor after a police raid. Through Jan's love of records as both musical and consumable objects, the audience learns to invest in music emotionally and view it as transformative. Such plot points are essential to the play's use of music to construct an underground imaginary.

In these moments, Rock ‘n’ Roll's narrative and sonic use of rock music extends the play's utopic potential to artists besides the Plastic People. Syd Barrett, for example, is particularly important to the spatial remaking that takes place in Rock ‘n’ Roll. Barrett haunts the play, which refers to him, to his solo album Madcap Laughs (1970), and to his early work on Pink Floyd's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). Positioning Barrett as specter, Stoppard creates an eerie parallel to the way Barrett has ghosted rock music since his descent into madness and withdrawal from public life in the late 1960s. Shortly after Jan plays Barrett's “Golden Hair” on his record player, the lights crash to black, and Pink Floyd's “Astronomy Domine” blasts through the theatre.Footnote ⁷² Like Jirous and the Plastic People, “Astronomy Domine” situates music as a transformative space located underground: “Floating down, the sound surrounds / Around the icy waters underground.”Footnote ⁷³ The band chants each line over the dual guitar tracks, a driving, palm-muted rhythm guitar punctuated by the jangly echoes of reverb-heavy lead guitar.Footnote ⁷⁴ Pushing beyond the here and now, “Astronomy Domine” produces a dark underground that attempts to move away from normative habits and quotidian experiences through the limitless potential of outer space. The psychedelic sound Pink Floyd cultivated on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn epitomizes experimentation and musical transcendence, paralleling the transcendent underground spaces in the Plastic People's music.

In some ways, the play's interactions with Barrett firmly situate rock music in what cultural critics Lauren Goodlad and Michael Bibby call a “mainstream alternative” or “signifier[ ] of countercultural possibility” that both increases cultural cachet and firmly incorporates a subculture into mainstream culture.Footnote ⁷⁵ Barrett represents a nostalgic radical past that is safely accessible because it has failed—after all, Barrett left Pink Floyd and public life due to mental illness, and the radical potential of the 1960s eventually fizzled out. Even so, playing his music within the confines of the theatre gestures toward and momentarily helps re-create the utopic (and audiotopic) potential in his music. Jan's love for Barrett and early Pink Floyd—along with other rock darlings of 1967, including The Velvet Underground & Nico and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band—represents his love for a critical, artistic engagement with social norms. Like that of the Plastic People, however, Jan's passion for rock is about its aesthetics; he loves the music and bemoans the fact that journalists only write about the Plastic People's politics. This focus on “the music” situates the transformative potential of rock music in the act of listening. Highlighting the listener's experience and emphasizing music's powerful affective resonances and audiotopic potential, Stoppard implicitly directs audiences simply to let the music wash over them in the musical interludes.

It is possible, then, that these musical sequences could be read as moments of disengagement—a form of checking out from the content and politics of the play. After all, much like Jirous's “second culture,” the fictional Plastic People in Rock ‘n’ Roll represent a complete disavowal of and disengagement with dominant culture. Stoppard emphasizes that the Plastic People signify apathy. When Jan explains that the fictional Ivan Jirous was arrested because a policeman was angry about Jirous's long hair, he describes long hair as a sign of Jirous's “indifference. Jirous doesn't care. He doesn't care enough even to cut his hair.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Such apathy, Jan contends, offers a critical challenge to the establishment because it refuses to recognize its existence and authority. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Plastics exist on a different plane from government authority. Rather than conform to normative styles and roles, they refuse to cut their hair and participate in mainstream society. Situating the Plastics outside normative culture, Jan argues that the underground should be understood as indifferent, a culture located outside mainstream systems of value and meaning.

Although emphasizing the Plastics’ complete apathy highlights the ways rock music might provide subversive power, the particular nature of this subversion is complicated by the ways Rock ‘n’ Roll uses music in live performances. These moments are distinctly not apathetic or disengaging; instead, they force audience members to approach the world differently through the perspective of music. Cutting the lights and blaring both classic rock and underground music, Rock ‘n’ Roll thrusts its audiences into an audiotopic space. These scene changes treat the theatre as a space altered by rock music, but they also frame it as a transformative space that transports the audience to and from this soundscape. In some ways, such a use of music is Brechtian in that it further produces a feeling of alienation and defamiliarization for the audience. However, in this case, Stoppard does not necessarily value the potential of this alienation to produce intellectual engagement or to politicize people to take up a particular cause. Rather, his use of music reproduces the audiotopic mode of listening that we saw in the Plastic People's discussions about the Velvet Underground. When Hlavsa and his friends performed an empathetic act of listening, their experience expanded beyond their present moment of musical consumption and connected them to a different time and place. This richly affective experience inspired them to reassess their current moment, to imagine things otherwise. Thrusting the audience into the black noise of the “smash cut” set changes similarly asks Stoppard's audience to imagine the world otherwise by reconstituting the Plastic People's “velvet underground” in live performances.

Such a reading of Rock ‘n’ Roll's use of music in live performance marks a clear departure from recent scholarship on Stoppard, which has categorized him primarily as a historical playwright who works in the realist tradition.Footnote ⁷⁷ Critics often categorize Stoppard's historical references as a way of rewriting the past, as in Christopher Innes's description of Rock ‘n’ Roll as an exercise in “documentary” realism.Footnote ⁷⁸ Stoppard's earlier plays The Invention of Love (1997) and those constituting the Coast of Utopia trilogy (2003) also fall easily into these categories of “historical” drama and “documentary” realism: all three involve fictionalized versions of historical personalities, reflecting a more general historical and realist turn in Stoppard's later oeuvre.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, even when working within the historical realm, Ira Nadel notes, Stoppard's plays retain an emphasis on fiction and treat facts as the building blocks of fiction.Footnote ⁸⁰ Theatre critics, however, have celebrated Rock ‘n’ Roll specifically because of its ties to “real” history, echoing Pareles's and Fricke's celebration of the Plastic People's historical role in Czech politics. In Carol Rocamora's and David Benedict's reviews of Rock ‘n’ Roll, we hear a familiar refrain: the Plastic People really did exist, their music really did spark the Velvet Revolution, rock music really did fertilize and empower subversive cultural spaces during the 1960s and 1970s, and Stoppard himself really was born in Czechoslovakia, which gives the play an air of biographical authenticity.Footnote ⁸¹

Intimately yoked to these historical and realist readings of Stoppard is an implicit celebration of Western values, whose triumph over communism in 1989 punctuates this recent history. Director Trevor Nunn conceptualized Rock ‘n’ Roll as ultimately about the issue of Western freedom winning out over communist captivity. Collapsing real and imagined spaces, Nunn noted that in England, characters have freedom yet choose to live in communal conditions, whereas in Czechoslovakia “a form of communal living was imposed.”Footnote ⁸² Stoppard similarly saw his play and the Czechoslovakian underground as centrally about the issue of “individual choice—people choosing individually how they want to live.”Footnote ⁸³ Despite overwhelming support for focusing on the historical parts of the play, to read Rock ‘n’ Roll as just a historical work is to reduce the play to the historical chronology in which its narrative takes place. Such a reading reinforces the status quo of rock music as mainstream alternative; but perhaps it is the play's very ability to be read in this way that made it a success in the first place.

By the time Rock ‘n’ Roll opened at London's Royal Court Theatre on 3 June 2006, it was already booked to transfer to the West End a mere six weeks later. While Nunn saw this as prudent planning, there is no doubt that London theatre companies saw the latest play by the well-established Stoppard as a guaranteed hit.Footnote ⁸⁴ The play was indeed successful, and it stayed on at the Duke of York's Theatre until February 2007. It later toured and opened on Broadway, where it enjoyed similar success. Critical reception of the play in the United States was quite good, despite general concern that Stoppard's “erudite” style and “literary” reputation might render the play inaccessible for American theatregoers.Footnote ⁸⁵ Overall, US critics lauded the democratizing effects of play's use of popular music; the audience might get confused by the various references to Czech politics, Marxist philosophy, or Sappho's poetry, but the songs proved instantly recognizable to audiences who could “hum along.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Even though Stoppard's use of popular rock music allowed the audience moments of identification, this focus on rock music as lingua franca obscures the more complex role of music in the play and virtually erases the place of the Plastic People, whose music few if any spectators would have recognized. When reviewers have discussed the role of rock music in Rock ‘n’ Roll, many have indirectly rehearsed the play's surface-level idolization of the Plastic People as the living embodiment of rock's subversive power. Rolling Stone described Rock ‘n’ Roll as centrally “about the stubborn saving grace of music.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The New Yorker explained that because “rock and roll legislates by joy, not by reason,” it fulfilled an important role in Czechoslovakia by “corrupting the world with pleasure.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Though not all critics celebrated this use of music—The Wall Street Journal thought the Czech parts of the play entirely unnecessary, noting that Stoppard “would have done better to stick to the English half”—the majority situated rock music as a subversive expression of passion and joy that disrupts normative culture.Footnote ⁸⁹ Situated safely within the confines of acceptable consumption, rock music loses its critical potential when mainstream listeners fetishize it as radical, different, and revolutionary.

To be fair, Stoppard's play does invite this reading of itself and rock music. The characters do their share of uncritically celebrating rock, and the play's soundtrack juxtaposes the cacophony of the Plastic People with the more polished sounds of celebrated bands from mainstream rock. On one level, the play's development hinges on the audience's bubblegum-pop assumptions about rock music, including its revolutionary potential, its countercultural currency, and maybe even its historical importance in the censored Soviet cultures. Yet to take this commonsense bait leaves us with an anemic reading of the rich cultural reanimation Rock ‘n’ Roll offers and doesn't allow us to engage fully with what the music in Stoppard's play actually does during a live performance.

To listen to rock music most completely during live performances of Rock ‘n’ Roll, we must listen back through the performance genealogy Stoppard invokes by situating the Plastic People alongside Western rock bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and, of course, the Velvet Underground. The play's use of the Plastic People's music extends far beyond the immediate moment of the play's performance; it harks back to the Plastic People's reperformances of the Velvet Underground's music and the band's intention to create a “velvet underground” through their own musical performances. By understanding the performance genealogy that links Rock ‘n’ Roll to the Plastic People and the Plastic People to the Velvet Underground, we can see that Stoppard's act of performance surrogation connects contemporary theatre audiences to 1960s underground rock music performances.

Toward a Plastic Future

If Rock ‘n’ Roll's re-creation of the Plastic People's hopeful longing reproduces a cultural moment and feeling that otherwise exists only as a void within the recesses of rock history, we might return, briefly, to Joseph Roach and consider the purchase of describing this as a moment of surrogation. Stoppard wrote Rock ‘n’ Roll in 2006, at the height of debates about the ethics and efficacy of Britain's involvement in Iraq at the end of Tony Blair's tenure as prime minister. Capitalizing on an uptick of radicalism in British society, he offered audiences a play about a radical cultural past. The play's more conservative elements also have grounding in this cultural context, for Rock ‘n’ Roll was written during a highly reactionary moment following the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Emerging during a tense historical moment that violently pulled Britain in two seemingly opposite ideological directions, Rock ‘n’ Roll presented rock music as a way to suture conservative and radical impulses and imagine a different future. Although Rock ‘n’ Roll's plot suggests that Stoppard aimed to harvest the radical spirit of 1960s music in a gesture of safe nostalgia that may have reaffirmed the neoliberal policies of the present, the play accomplished this reaffirmation by connecting the present moment of intense political strife and protest to a radical and politically charged past.

This raises questions about the interdependency of the play's conservative and radical elements. How does Stoppard's celebration of rock ‘n’ roll as, in Pareles's terms, a “talisman of freedom and affluence” pertain to the play's engagement with the Plastic People? At least some of the utopic power in the play's use of the Plastic People's music stems from its celebration of rock music. Without the play's celebratory narrative, the songs are little more than noise in a dark room. What Roach identifies as the inevitable “deficit” or “surplus” produced in the wake of imperfect replacement here emerges as an excess of hope and potentiality from the productive friction between the Plastic People's radical gesture and Stoppard's somewhat conservative rendering of it.Footnote ⁹⁰

By offering audiences a radically utopic reperformance of a cultural space otherwise available only in nostalgic reminiscences, Rock ‘n’ Roll scripts and archives alternative performance histories. Diana Taylor's distinction between archive and repertoire is again useful here: as dramatic literature, Rock ‘n’ Roll writes the Plastic People into the history of Western rock music; as a live performance, it reconstitutes the historical spaces of the band's music and underground culture.Footnote ⁹¹ Turning to the past, Rock ‘n’ Roll uses rock music as a utopic performative to imagine a different future. In its permeation of the theatrical space, Rock ‘n’ Roll re-creates underground spaces and alternative lifeworlds that allow the audience to experience briefly a transformative space and engage with the utopic imaginary cultivated in the Plastic People's music. The musical interludes warp the play's chronology not only with nostalgic yearnings for an idealized past but also with utopic hope for change and the possibility of an alternative future. By re-creating this “velvet underground,” then, Rock ‘n’ Roll points to the recuperative potentiality of performance in contemporary neoliberal culture and suggests that a different, more plastic future is possible.