And Pan is there, of course, in the music, in the tracks from the Stones and Dylan and the Velvet Underground and the Dead that punctuate each change of scene. Rock, the modern song of Pan, smashes through the play's unfolding tale of history, crushing us with its force and filling us with its energy as it takes us from Prague Spring to Velvet Revolution and beyond.
Sometimes, in the middle of the play's journeys from England's Cambridge to Prague and back again, it's easy to lose track of Pan's voice, what with all the namedropping - Dubcek, Marx, Havel, and even the Plastic People of the Universe, a scraggly Czech rock band whose members, simply by insisting that their desire to play rock music had nothing to do with dissident politics, became political dissidents whether they liked it or not. Both at beginning and end, though, with lovely images and resonating sounds, Stoppard makes it clear what he's really up to here: Along with Syd Barrett and Mick Jagger, he's singing a rock song, an irrepressible anthem of love and freedom.
Barrett, the beautiful boy whose descent into druggy madness got him exiled from Pink Floyd, even appears as a character in "Rock 'n' Roll," though mostly an offstage one. His one onstage moment is a stunner: He opens the first scene perched on a garden wall, playing "Golden Hair" on what can only be a Pan pipe to a golden-haired girl below.
That girl is Esme, daughter of a Cambridge professor named Max Morrow and admirer of Max's Czech student Jan. Max and Jan have had a falling-out over the Soviet tanks that have just rolled through the streets of Prague; Jan is returning home - "to save socialism," he jokes - while Max remains unrepentantly pro-Soviet for the sake of his beloved Marx.
