Describing the premise of Rock ‘n’ Roll, his 2006 play, Tom Stoppard said it was as if “in some insane and sadistic parlor game, you’d drawn four or five subjects out of a hat and the task was to write a play about Sappho and Syd Barrett and brain science and what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989.” The actual inspiration was the fact that Barrett was ousted from Pink Floyd, the band he co-founded, in April 1968, smack in the middle of the Prague Spring, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that ended when Soviet troops invaded the country to quash reforms. The play, which is set in Cambridge and Prague and spans two decades, follows a rock-obsessed Czech academic who is horrified by his country’s politics, and a British Marxist who is inspired by Soviet politics. At Hampstead Theater, a revival comes during quite a different political landscape in England and Russia. (Stoppard has claimed the show predicted “cancel culture.”) Nina Raine directs. —Jensen Davis