my generation; Rufus Sewell gets ready to play Tom Stoppard's alter ego in Rock 'n' Roll, as the playwright's most dazzlingly personal work yet arrives on Broadway, writes Adam Green.

Tom Stoppard long ago put to rest the shibboleth that he was all head and no heart, but with his latest play, Rock 'n' Roll, which opens on Broadway this month after smash Royal Court and West End runs, he really kicks out the jams. Rock 'n' Roll doesn't exactly stint on ideas-it concerns itself with, among other things, the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia, the nature of consciousness, and the poetry of Sappho-but its spirit resides in the unruly fervor of such rockers as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, and U2, whose music gives the play its driving backbeat. "Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about bumming a ride on it," Stoppard says. "Everything goes up a gear when the music comes in. It's to do with the right noise at the right moment, but, God, it's a blessing."

After four decades in the _theater, Stoppard, whose breathtaking Coast of Utopia trilogy became last season's hot ticket, is no day-tripper. Rock 'n' Roll spans two decades, from the Soviet occupation of Prague in 1968 to the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the Iron Curtain in 1989. It revolves (literally, on Robert Jones's turntable set) around the intertwined lives of Max (Brian Cox), a Cambridge lecturer and defender of the Marxist faith, and Jan, his young, pop music-obsessed Czech protege, who returns to Prague hoping to live and let live and discovers that in a police state, it may be only rock 'n' roll, but they don't like it.

Jan, whom the Czech-born playwright has called an imagined version of who he might have become had he returned home after World War II, is played here by the wonderful Rufus Sewell in a performance that won him critical acclaim and an Olivier Award. The darkly handsome actor first made a splash in 1994, as the dashing young lover Will Ladislaw in a BBC miniseries of Middlemarch and, on the London stage, as the dashing young tutor Septimus Hodge in Arcadia, Stoppard's meditation on sex, death, and chaos theory.

Sewell brings to his second Stoppard outing a love of rock 'n' roll (during high school, he drummed in "lots and lots" of bands), a convincing Czech accent (he has shot six movies in Prague), and a more-than-passing resemblance to the playwright. As both an actor and an audience member, Sewell has been knocked out time and again by Stoppard's high-_flying erudition. "It's as though he loans you his intellect," he says. "And for that brief period you're as intelligent and mercurial as he is." But he finds himself drawn more to Rock 'n' Roll's earthiness: "It's very emotional and human and blokey, as we say. You don't have to pretend that you don't exist below the waist."

The protean Trevor Nunn, who directed Sewell in Arcadia and helmed the maiden voyage of The Coast of Utopia in 2002, returns here to deliver a crackling production that gives the quasi-cinematic structure of Rock 'n' Roll, with its jump cuts between countries and decades, a graceful narrative flow. He, too, brings to the table a rocker's past-as a youth in Ipswich, he fronted a band called the Trackers, whose signature tune was "Teenage Cremation"-not to mention a long association with Stoppard. As the young assistant director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-sixties, Nunn stumbled on a play by a fledgling dramatist that had come in over the transom. It was called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Though Nunn calls it his "personal tragedy" that he didn't get to direct it, he knew that he had found "an extraordinarily irreverent, unexpected bit of writing and a thrilling new voice."

For Nunn, directing a Stoppard play requires a balancing act between investigating the inner lives of its characters and teasing apart its thematic strands. He says, "Tom once said that maybe the best way to think about his work is that he starts out with one play he wants to write, and then he thinks of a different play he wants to write, so he writes them both and lets them collide."

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