#7
The Economist (UK)
August 10-16, 2002
Tom Stoppard
Coming ashore
“Les Mis” for intellectuals or a theatrical tour-de-force?

YOU'VE got to hand it to Sir Tom Stoppard: he doesn't make things easy for himself. At 65, he has reached an age when most well-established playwrights could be forgiven for lifting the pedal. His near contemporary Harold Pinter, for example, turned to shorter pieces years ago. Not Sir Tom. His latest work must be the most ambitious homegrown opening on the London theatre in ages. For his first production since “The Invention of Love” (1997), he has written in fact not one play but three. His new trilogy under the umbrella title, “The Coast of Utopia”, premiered over 12 hours (including two meal breaks) at the National Theatre on August 3rd.

A play that swirls with ideas and argument of the kind we have come to expect from Sir Tom, “The Coast of Utopia” makes a pageant of the lives of a stormy group of mid-19th-century Russian radicals whose theories, hopes and quarrels stamped the history of the next 150 years. For their sweep and daring alone, the three plays “Voyage”, “Shipwreck” and “Salvage” make a journey well worth taking.

Audacity, however, comes with a price. As with previous Stoppard works, “The Coast of Utopia” will best reward theatregoers prepared to do some homework. Similarly biographical in approach, “The Invention of Love” at least told of the life and thwarted, emotionally crippling love of a poet who is a household name in Britain, A.E. Housman. “Travesties” (1972) shone a light on Lenin and James Joyce as they bumped around Zurich in 1917. The new plays, by contrast, involve a larger set of less well-known characters, four turbulent decades of European history (1833-65) and ten locales, including Russian estates, Moscow, St Petersburg, Paris, London and Geneva. Historically rich, it is hard to keep track of: Mikhail Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen, let's face it, are simply not as familiar as the cast of, say, “EastEnders” or “The Sopranos”.

If there is a central character, it is the complicated and extraordinary Herzen, played with unflagging zeal by Stephen Dillane. At times even this anglophile, expatriate Russian socialist, a man whose attachments include a love of Colman's mustard, is not magnetic enough as a character to hold together a stage epic. But even watchers of “The Coast of Utopia” who lose the plot will be moved by the passion that runs through it with such strength.

It makes more sense with three

The first play, “Voyage”, which opens at the Bakunin country estate, has a melancholy, Chekhovian lilt, as the anarchist Bakunin and his friends speculate about life, love and whether progress will best come to their country by way of western or slavic ideals. (Sir Tom has steeped himself in Chekhov, having adapted “The Seagull” for Sir Peter Hall in 1997.) “Voyage” is the one work in the trio that looks likeliest to have its own onward separate life.

“Shipwreck”, the most tumultuous of the three plays, focuses on the failed European revolutions of 1848. To be crude, you could call this one “Les Misérables” for intellectuals: the staging of the Paris upheavals by Sir Trevor Nunn (who directed the entire trilogy) recalls nothing so much as his own production of that record-breaking musical. Yet here, too, personal and political interact: Herzen must struggle to rescue his ideals from the wreckage of events in the same year as an accident at sea drowns his wife and son.

By the time of “Salvage”, Herzen has settled in London, where his restless inquiry into society continues. “We have more to learn than to teach,” he concludes, experience having tempered Utopianism. The Herzen presented here is the Herzen of “My Past and Thoughts”, one of the greatest of all political memoirs, still passionate in his ideals, but ruefully accepting the simple need to get on and live, a kind of 19th-century Voltaire offering “the summer lightning of personal happiness” as his version of Candide's garden.

How far that lightning will strike audiences is going to depend on telling the westernising Ogarev from the slavophile Aksakov, the anarchist Bakunin from the literary critic Belinsky (played with febrile bravura by Will Keen in the plays' outstanding performance). Cuts would be welcome, but Sir Tom, who is famous for not listening to pleas from directors for dramatic economy, has so far resisted. At times it all feels like a blueprint for a period mini-series—Jeremy Irons as Herzen?—at others like a message play for today. “Shipwreck” in particular sounds alarms for our own disturbed age, and the work as a whole bursts with characters who, right or wrong, display a sense of urgency about how we should live. “The Coast of Utopia” ends elliptically with a single Russian word of affirmation: “Da”.

The National Theatre insists that each play is a self-contained whole. You would expect it to, if it is to sell tickets to visitors in town for a night or two, and if the work is to travel to, for example, New York, which is ill-served for 12-hour marathons. But it is no surprise that the trilogy days are selling most strongly. If you see “Shipwreck” or “Salvage” (the weakest of the three) on its own, you are likely to be lost among characters the clued-up trilogy-goers are welcoming back as old friends. Worse, you will miss the dramatic arc of this remarkable production, as the action courses over decades, in and out of personal calamity and ideological disillusion before coming to shore at what might best be described as a Stoppardian middle way.

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