LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) - Alive with ideas about life and politics and brimming with questions of the heart and mind, Tom Stoppard's splendid new play, "Rock 'n' Roll," proves that rock music has far greater significance than being the score to a teenage wasteland.

Written for the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre, the play moves to the Duke of York's Theatre on July 22.

Drawing on his Czech background, Stoppard sets the play from 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into what was then Czechoslovakia, through 1990, when the country emerged from Communist rule. At the outset, Jan (Rufus Sewell) is a Czech academic studying at Cambridge, his life entwined with that of his tutor, Max Morrow (Brian Cox), a stormy and entrenched Marxist, and Morrow's frail wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a tutor of Sapphic poetry.

Jan returns to Prague with his precious collection of rock albums and discovers the terror of repression compared with the freedom he revered in England. Not given to dissent, he is gradually drawn into resisting Soviet oppression and joins what became the Velvet Revolution, which led to the end of communism in his homeland.

Stoppard does not suggest the path is easy, nor does he provide much optimism that true freedom is to be had anywhere except in the heart and mind. The debates between Jan and his Prague friends over what constitutes rebellion, and between Jan and Max over the pros and cons of socialism, are the meaty centre of the play.

Eleanor's discovery that she has cancer and her persuasive argument that what's in the heart can be overwhelmed if the body's machine breaks down goes directly to Stoppard's point about the destructive nature of a closed society.

It all sounds very heavy, but while Stoppard does not indulge in the flights of verbal fancy that feature in his earlier plays, he does construct his scenes and dialogue using his extraordinary gift for beautiful phrases and sentences. The conversations and arguments over dinner in Cambridge and in Jan's album-strewn room in Prague are rich and absorbing, with some very funny jokes.

Each scene is punctuated with a rock track from such acts as the Velvet Underground, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. Songs by Floyd's lost founder, Syd Barrett, are the keynote for Stoppard's theme that rock music sounded the death knell for repression but also heralded a freedom filled with its own perils.

A real-life Prague band, the Plastic People of the Universe, becomes Jan's touchstone for true rebellion, and pied piper Barrett offers a poetic escape for the sadness of Eleanor and the hopes of her daughter, Esme (also Cusack).

Director Trevor Nunn and designer Robert Jones give the play energy and motion, aided greatly by some very good acting from Cox and Cusack and especially from Sewell as the cautiously optimistic expatriate.