Midway through “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Jan, the reluctant dissident at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s new play, says, “There are no stories in Czechoslovakia. We have an arrangement with ourselves not to disturb the appearances. We aim for inertia. We mass-produce banality. We’ve had no history since ‘68, only pseudo-history.” Having left his native Czechoslovakia in diapers when his parents fled the Nazis in 1938, Stoppard now imagines how his return might have gone.

In this unwieldy reflection on politics, poetics, rock music as expression of personal liberty and a whole lot else, the playwright creates his own pseudo-history by sending Jan back from cozy Cambridge to face Soviet occupation in Prague.

The rock ‘n’ roll-loving prodigal’s dissident status is earned less by activism than by belief in the power of outsider music — notably Czech band the Plastic People of the Universe, whose underground appearances sparked police violence and a ban on performing. Unlike some of his more hardline friends, Jan resists the politicization of his beliefs, convinced he can exist peacefully within the system of state control. But he gradually gets chewed up and spat out by it.

That 20-year process — spanning the Prague Spring of 1968 through the Velvet Revolution and fall of old-school communism two decades later — is charted in the meticulously calibrated changes in actor Rufus Sewell’s countenance, in his bearing and in his eyes, leaving him a man in many ways diminished yet still able to be amazed and amused by life’s ironies.