Stoppard, Zizka and Czechoslovakia

With a career spanning four decades, from 1967's

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

to

Rock 'n' Roll

, which opened on Broadway last season and has its local premiere at the Wilma Theater on Wednesday, Tom Stoppard is considered by many to be the greatest living English-language playwright.

Though he believes that there is no need for more Stoppard-on-Stoppard, and that his plays should just be "out there," he agreed to a phone interview from London because "I love the Wilma."

"Blanka can make me do anything she wants," he says of Blanka Zizka, who is co-artistic director of the Wilma with her former husband, Jiri. The Zizkas have a long history of producing Stoppard plays, and - especially pertinent for

Rock 'n' Roll

- they are, like Stoppard, Czech-born.

Blanka, who directs

Rock 'n' Roll

, arrived in the United States in November 1977 (Jiri had come four months earlier) with a 9-month-old son and no money, knowing so little English she couldn't even order a cup of coffee. "It was terrifying," she says. "I learned English by translating newspapers and watching

Sesame Street

."

Rock 'n' Roll

, which premiered in London in 2006, concerns the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Russia's invasion of neighboring Georgia last month - 40 years later almost to the day - makes the play seem eerily relevant.

But Stoppard, who is 71, believes the differences between the events are significant. "The connection is complicated.

Rock 'n' Roll

is dealing with the notion of a sacred ideology, while in 2008 countries are more concerned with having a business plan than an ideology," he says. "Population gives you clout in the world, so this conflict seems more about demographics.

"I don't consider myself a guru, but the current situation is a version of state capitalism - the real difference is in the way Russia is run."

As a character in the play says, in 1990 as the Soviet system is collapsing, "Marx read his Darwin but he missed it: Capitalism doesn't self-destruct, it adapts" - a line Blanka Zizka finds prophetic, given the economic rise of Russia and China.

She agrees with Stoppard that the events in Georgia differ from those in 1968 Czechoslovakia. For one thing, she notes, "there are ethnic problems in Georgia since 1990 - there are two languages spoken in the country, and this was not the situation in Czechoslovakia. We were all supposed to unite against capitalism, but now there is nationalism coming out everywhere."

And during the fleeting 1968 liberalization known as the Prague Spring, "the idea in Czechoslovakia was that there was a third way, a socialistic base that would allow human dignity and a free press."

The invasion began on her 14th birthday; her small town's army base made it a Soviet target. "We felt anger, outrage," she recalls, and threw stones at the tanks. A delegation of students soon arrived from Prague, bringing news and bloodied flags. But without weapons, they had little more than their sense of humor to wield: The statue of Lenin in the town's center was wearing a backpack by the next day, and she and her friends helped change street signs to confuse the invaders.

Zizka believes one of the challenges of

Rock 'n' Roll

is to capture the emotional life of its characters, "so that they're not just smart people talking." Similarly, Stoppard says that "plays are a storytelling art form, and this is a love story that exploits the events of the time in which it happens. The individual person's story is what drives the play, rather than the geopolitical - theater is a recreation, not op-ed."

To make

Rock 'n' Roll

clearer and "more visceral" to American audiences, Zizka decided to use visual images of life as "regular people" lived it. She spent a month on research, since she is the only person working on the production able to read Czech newspapers, and dipped back into the personal, unearthing letters she had written to family members. "I didn't expect working on this play to be painful, but it is," she says. "My life is divided."

Stoppard's Jewish family fled to Singapore when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, and two years later, when the Japanese took Singapore, relocated to India. His father died in a Singapore prison camp, his mother remarried in India, and the family moved to England when Stoppard was 8. He retains "a fantastic nostalgia for India - I dreamt about India for years." But he had no memories of Czechoslovakia.

"When I went back to my birthplace in Czechoslovakia, I found the little house which we had lived in before my memory began. It was terribly powerful - the house had been there all the time. It was overpowering to think of my mother as a young woman." And so the theme of the past is his theme, in this play as in many of his others: "I'm a sucker for that kind of journey - it strikes a chord with me all the time."

Rock 'n' Roll

is the result of "a notion I had for a long time of writing a spurious autobiography - the story of myself if we had gone back to Czechoslovakia after the war." Thus he feels a "special connection" with the character Jan, a music-loving Czech graduate student who comes to study at Cambridge University and falls in love with England. Jan's mentor, Max, is a Marxist philosopher, the "last communist standing" in Britain, who refuses to relinquish the good idea ("To be human is to be joined together! Society!") simply because it didn't work.

Stoppard's plays are, as he has observed elsewhere, about the passage of time. One of the impetuses for this script was seeing a photo of Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett. A beautiful and wildly self-destructive rocker when young, Barrett in the photo is a bald 60-year-old riding a bicycle home from the grocery store in Cambridge. The Pink Floyd lyric "Won't you miss me?" seems particularly apt.

(While Barrett is a presence in

Rock 'n' Roll

, the title really refers to the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe. The Plastic People's unwillingness to bend to the Soviet will landed them in prison and made them a symbol of the rebellion that ultimately climaxed in 1989's Velvet Revolution, which ended communism in Czechoslovakia and brought playwright/activist Vaclav Havel - to whom Stoppard dedicated the play - to the presidency. Music punctuates

Rock 'n' Roll

, a sound design so specific that exact portions of album tracks - Rolling Stones, the Doors, Beach Boys, U2 - are designated in the script.)

Eleanor, Max's wife, is "on the clock" in a different way: A classicist who tutors students in ancient Greek poetry, she is dying of cancer. Asked why Sappho is the subject of her tutorials, Stoppard betrays a slight irritation: "She has to have something to talk about - and Sappho is my interest, not hers. It's not an 'ingredient'." He elaborates: "The fact that Sappho's poetry survives only in fragments has always attracted me. That it's about lesbian love is completely irrelevant - love is love."

Of his eclectic interests, Stoppard says

Rock 'n' Roll

's "constituents represent four or five different plays - it's a spendthrift way to use up things I've collected in a quiet way," including not only Sappho's poetry, rock music and Czech politics, but also cognitive science - the way we consciously know things, which becomes the play's brain-vs.-mind debate.

Stoppard is not working on a new play - yet. When he does start the next one, he will write it by hand, because he uses neither a computer nor a typewriter. He says he has six fountain pens (one with red ink) and uses white A4 paper. Some things don't change.