Can American culture make Muslims love us?
It centers on a rock-loving, record-collecting Czech intellectual in the years between 1968 and 1990, a span of historic tumult: ’68 was the year of the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet crackdown; ’90 was the first full year of the Velvet Revolution—Vaclav Havel’s rise to the presidency, Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal of troops, and the Rolling Stones’ first-ever concert in Prague. The play ends with our hero and his friends cheering wildly at the Stones concert, as if it—and not the crash of communism—marked the real revolution, and Stoppard’s point is that, in a way, it did or that, anyway, the two were much the same thing. Havel—celebrated playwright and essayist, leader of the Czech dissident movement in the ’70s, one of the authors of the Charter 77 petition, jailed for many years as a result—was deeply affected by rock ‘n’ roll. (One of his first acts as president was to appoint Frank Zappa as an adviser on trade and tourism.) A turning point in the dissidents’ movement, a
