Stephen Dillane

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The Coast of Utopia

Voyage Shipwreck Salvage

2002

National Theatre

The Coast of Utopia comprises three sequential but self-contained plays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage. They tell an epic story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in the struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors.

Set in the mid-19th century in Russia and Europe, the trilogy follows a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I.  Among them are the idealist and anarchist Michael Bakunin who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russian history, who becomes the main focus of a drama of politics, love, loss and betrayal.

What's on Stage

Friday April 26, 2002

Dillane Stars in Stoppard Utopia Trilogy at NT, 3 Aug

by Terri Paddock

Award-winning actor Stephen Dillane (pictured) is bouncing back from the disappointment over his last stage production - Hannie Rayson's Life After George which, in March, closed after only one month at the West End's Duchess Theatre - by headlining Tom Stoppard's much-anticipated stage trilogy which receives its world premiere, directed by Trevor Nunn, at the National Theatre this summer. The Coast of Utopia - comprising Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage - will open at the NT Olivier on 3 August 2002, following previews from 27 June.

A sweeping epic tracking the history of 19th-century Russia, The Coast of Utopia features a 29-strong cast depicting 50 characters, both fictional as well as real-life individuals such as Karl Marx and Ivan Turgenev. The plays can be seen individually or as a whole, with an estimated running time of some seven hours excluding breaks, on one of seven planned "trilogy days".

While his most recent stage foray failed, despite good notices for his own performance, Dillane is best known for his numerous stage successes, one of his most successful being in another Stoppard vehicle, the 1999 Donmar revival of the playwright's 1982 tragi-comedy The Real Thing, which transferred to the West End and Broadway. That much-lauded production garnered numerous accolades, including a Tony Award and Olivier nomination of Best Actor for Dillane.

The actor's other stage credits have included a landmark Hamlet for Peter Hall in 1994, Uncle Vanya, Endgame, Hush, and previously at the National, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Beaux Stratagem, Dancing at Lughnasa and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. On television, the actor has appeared in The Rector's Wife, while films have included Sarajevo and Firelight.

The highly accomplished cast of The Coast of Utopia also includes RSC regular Guy Henry, John Carlisle (currently seen on TV in The Forsyte Saga and previously on stage in Stoppard's The Invention of Love at the National and in the West End), Raymond Coulthard (The Relapse), Eve Best (The Heiress, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore), Charlotte Emerson (The Cherry Orchard), Douglas Henshall (This Year's Love, Angels and Insects), Anna Maxwell-Martin (The Little Foxes) and Janine Duvitski (Abigail's Party).

The Observer

Sunday June 2, 2002

The forgotten revolutionary

Tom Stoppard celebrates the life of Alexander Herzen, the courageous radical Russian exile who became the inspiration for his forthcoming National Theatre trilogy

Orsett House is still there, amazingly, standing like a giant chunk of yellowing wedding cake on a left-hand corner in Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, before you reach the Westway flyover. Now converted into flats, it is almost the last of the detached rich man's houses that must have given the terrace an extra cachet as a street address in Victorian London.

Over the portico floated two home-made banners which, if the crowd could have deciphered them, would have told it what was being celebrated that evening. 'The Free Russian Press' was on one banner, and on the other, 'Freedom of the Russian Peasant'. The emancipation of the serfs had lately been proclaimed by Alexander II, henceforth 'the Tsar Liberator'. After some delay, the text reached London, and it was decided to hold 'a monster fete' to celebrate the great event. Every Russian in London, 'of whatever party', was promised a fraternal welcome by the wealthy tenant of Orsett House.

The host was Alexander Herzen, son of a Russian nobleman, founder of the Free Russian Press, editor of Kolokol ('The Bell'), author of a memoir-in-progress, My Past and Thoughts, and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russian history. Orsett House is one of a dozen addresses Herzen occupied in London, where he lived continuously between 1852 and 1864. He was the best-known Russian exile anywhere. When he lived in Putney (at Laurel House, 'Mr Tinkler's', in the High Street), Herzen was in the Putney guidebook.

Herzen gave due credit for freeing the serfs to Tsar Alexander, and if he saved some of it for himself, this would not have been absurd. The American liberal critic Dwight Macdonald called the Bell 'perhaps the most effective muckraking magazine in radical history'. Isaiah Berlin, Herzen's most distinguished and most committed cheerleader in modern times, called him a writer and thinker of genius. Herzen was seldom modest about himself, for that matter. ' Copperfield ', he remarked in a letter about this time, 'is Dickens's Past and Thoughts'. The timing of the 'monster fete', five weeks after the emancipation, may not have been unconnected with the fact that it was the week of his forty-ninth birthday.

As a direct result of reading Russian Thinkers, a collection of Berlin's essays assembled and edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (The Hogarth Press, 1978), I was inspired, about five years ago, to try to write a play about... Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic of whom I had never heard. (I hadn't long heard of Herzen, either. This was not particularly shameful. Dwight Macdonald, who abridged Herzen's four-volume memoirs for Knopf in 1973, checked out a few of his socio-cultural friends, and they hadn't heard of him).

Belinsky was a friend of Herzen. I wanted to write about him because when he visited Paris he couldn't bear the rowdy free-for-all of the uncensored literary scene; he wanted to get back to the punitive restrictions in Russia where, as a consequence of censorship, 'people look to writers as their real leaders'. That was arresting.

But the future anarchist Michael Bakunin, the writer Ivan Turgenev and other equally interesting figures elbowed their way into the picture. Most interesting of all was Herzen. A year or so later, I confessed to Trevor Nunn, who had recently succeeded Richard Eyre at the Royal National Theatre, 'I'm writing three plays called Bakunin, Belinsky and Herzen... I think.'

In the event, Voyage, the first third of the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, is centred on Bakunin and his family circle; Belinsky appears in Voyage and Shipwreck; and Herzen becomes the focus of Shipwreck and Salvage. The three men appear in all three plays, which are sequential but (I like to think), self-contained, and so may be seen in the 'wrong' order (like Star Wars ).

I haven't counted the characters, but our designer, Bill Dudley, told me weeks ago that the plays needed 169 costumes (to be worn by a company of 30 actors), and I've added a few since then. Isaiah Berlin is The Coast of Utopia 's presiding spirit, but it was Carr's The Romantic Exiles, as well as his terrific biography of Bakunin, which impelled the expansion. (There is no general biography of Herzen in English; a glaring need.) Who, then, were 'the Romantic Exiles', and why were they Romantic?

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia. In this country we think of the Romantics as being mostly concerned with the worship of Nature, and (but also through) a new kind of literature. But in Europe it was human nature which the Revolution worshipped - for the liberation of the individual from moral and political absolutism.

In Moscow in the early 1830s, among the young men and women of the educated elite, there were two related but distinct responses to Tsarist absolutism (where there was a response at all), both of them nurtured in the student body of Moscow University: the 'philosophical circle', and the 'political circle', amicably decried by each other as 'German sentimentalists' and 'French frondeurs'. Both circles were tiny. The philosophicals took refuge from unpleasant reality in the 'inner liberation' offered by German idealism. Their most famous alumnus turned out to be Bakunin. Meanwhile, the politicals studied the French Revolution and the utopian socialists. Their leader was young Herzen.

They were easy meat for the Third Section, the prototype KGB established by Nicholas I in the shock-wave of the officers' plot known as the Decembrist Revolt. In 1834, when Herzen was 22, he and a few others, including his closest colleague, the poet Nicholas Ogarev, were arrested.

Herzen spent six years in prison and exile. By the time he was deemed to have expiated his sins sufficiently to be allowed abroad, Herzen was 34, married to his first cousin Natalie and, by the death of his father, rich. In January 1847 he left Russia with Natalie, their three children, his mother, a tutor, a nanny, and two female dependents, 'in two carriages, padded against the winter cold with fur'. Their ostensible reason for travel was to seek help for one of the children who was deaf from birth. They might have expected to return in six months but, of the family, none saw Russia again. Two-year-old Tata lived to be interviewed in old age by the author of The Romantic Exiles (1933). Her elder brother, Sasha, became a professor of physiology and died in Lausanne in 1906. These were the two relatively happy endings among the five Herzens who set off that January day.

The party was heading for Paris, the home of revolution ('I came to Paris as people used to come to Jerusalem or Rome'). The Herzens were visiting Italy when revolution broke out in Paris in February 1848, but returned in time for Herzen to experience, with growing disgust, the events that were to transform the Second Republic into the Empire of Napoleon III.

In tandem with these public disasters, he experienced a series of private tragedies which finally, five and a half years after leaving home, brought him to England to lick his wounds for, as he thought, a few months.

London was full of refugees from the failures of 'the year of revolution' on the Continent, and it was a sad time. But Herzen had one advantage over the rest of the exiles - he had got his money out of Russia (with the help of a Rothschild). When he started the Free Russian Press as a way of re-engaging with the struggle, it was the saving of his middle years. After the death of Tsar Nicholas, Ogarev and his wife, another Natalie, joined him in London and soon their journal, the Bell, was on course for the emancipation party at Orsett House.

Herzen planned a dramatic gesture at the party. He secretly intended to propose the health of the tsar. He had prepared his speech. He knew he would cause a sensation in the Russian world by this public, symbolic overture by the exile to the autocrat.

A few minutes before Herzen's guests started to arrive, news came from Warsaw that Russian troops had opened fire on a rioting crowd and killed many people. An atmosphere of gloom took much of the joy out of the party. Herzen put away his speech. The next issue of the Bell denounced the Liberator Tsar for the Polish massacres.

The Bell was then at its peak. It wasn't much to look at (think of Private Eye without illustrations or much in the way of layout, printed on newspaper) but its circulation was astounding for a magazine which had to be smuggled to its readers - it had a print run of 2,500 and some editions had to be reprinted. It had been going for nearly four years, during which time it pleased almost every section of literate Russian society, even in the Winter Palace, where the tsar was said to read it; he was on the side of reform and so was Herzen, the most visible and most eloquent opponent of Russian autocracy.

For the previous couple of years, Herzen and his magazine (and Herzen's closest friend, fellow exile and co-editor Ogarev) had been wrangling with the emerging - and militantly inclined - 'new men' at home, but Herzen was still cock of the opposition walk.

But, on the night of the party at Orsett House, when the news arrived from Poland, the edifice of Herzen's reputation invisibly and inaudibly cracked. The article he wrote about the Polish massacre (titled 'Mater Dolorosa') was his first open attack on Alexander II in person, and the Bell 's constituency began to fracture. For some, the Polish business was a test of patriotism. For the 'new men', it showed what Herzen's 'ally' was made of; moreover, they had always argued - and still argued - that true emancipation would require the axe, not the pen. The cause of emancipation had united disparate parties. With emancipation officially achieved, they re-discovered what divided them.

The Bell was no longer at the centre of gravity. Circulation dropped. When Herzen and Ogarev and their dependents left England four years later, it was partly in an attempt to save their magazine by moving it to Geneva, which was filling up with Russian exiles as Alexander's regime grew tougher, and by printing a French edition. It didn't work. The Bell tolled for the last time in 1868. By then Herzen was not just marginalised, but openly derided by the 'nihilist' generation, and on 14 January, 1870, eight years and nine months after the party in Westbourne Terrace, he died while on a visit to Paris.

It was not the end of the story. Herzen had 'invented' Russian populism in reaction to the failure of Western socialist democracy in the European revolutions of 1848. By the end of the 1870s, Herzen was being re-read at home by the generation which 'went to the people'. In the course of time, he received a casual endorsement from Lenin, and that made him a sacred figure in Soviet Russia. In Moscow, a boulevard was named after him. Lenin's imprimatur was to cause some difficulty to Herzen's Soviet editors, for the best-known absentee at Orsett House - best-known to us, unknown to London at large - was Karl Marx.

Marx distrusted Herzen, and was despised by him in return. Herzen had no time for the kind of mono-theory that bound history, progress and individual autonomy to some overarching abstraction like Marx's material dialecticism. What he did have time for - and what bound Isaiah Berlin to him - was the individual over the collective, the actual over the theoretical. What he detested above all was the conceit that future bliss justified present sacrifice and bloodshed. The future, said Herzen, was the offspring of accident and wilfulness. There was no libretto or destination, and there was always as much in front as behind.

Herzen was not alone in thinking thus, but the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for example, was not in Herzen's character. He was original among his contemporaries in facing the situation, as he saw it, almost with relief, even with relish. Wit and courage would be needed, but if nothing were certain, everything was possible. The future belonged to us, not we to it. Beyond that, nothing much could be counted on - 'only art, and the summer lightning of personal happiness'.

National Theatre

Summer 2002

The Russians are coming

Tom Stoppard talks for the first time about his epic new trilogy The Coast of Utopia.  Jonathan Croall listens.

To write one play for the National may be regarded as good fortune;  to write three looks like recklessness.  Tom Stoppard half agrees.  "I'm not sure if I would have got into this if I'd realised it would turn into a trilogy," he says only half-jokingly, as we talk on the eve of rehearsals for The Stoppard Trilogy.

Stoppard first had the idea of writing something about nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary figures nearly five years ago, soon after The Invention of Love, his last play, opened at the National.  One inspiration was Isaiah Berlin's book of essays on Russian Thinkers;  another was his abiding interest in the position of writers in totalitarian societies. 

Set in Russia, Paris and London, it deals with the ferment of revolutionary ideas that swept through mid-nineteenth-century Europe.  While the three plays - Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage - centre on the turbulent lives of Herzen and Bakunin, Stoppard has also brought in other historical figures, including Karl Marx, the French socialist Louis Blanc and, most notably the writer Ivan Turgenev.

Stoppard, now sixty-four, is disarmingly frank about the problems of tackling such a vast subject.  "I have to confess this was by far the most arduous thing I've done.  I began to realise the brain couldn't cope in the way it used to do. I read all the sources twice before I started, but there was so much to keep in mind, if I left it alone for a few days I had to go back and read the material again.  I didn't pace myself very well.  In the end my notes took up much more paper than the plays themselves."

A long-time admirer of Chekhov, he had been wanting to write a "Russian Play" for some time.  In 1997 he worked on a version of The Seagull with Peter Hall.  I've always felt very envious of Chekhov, the way nothing seems to be going on in his plays, and yet it's all intensely interesting and dramatic."  Gorky, in the shape of Trevor Nunn's 1999 production of Summerfolk, was another catalyst, notably for the first play, Voyage.  "As I sat in the Olivier I thought, I want to write one of these - with this actual set and these very people!"

Voyage is certainly more domestic in tone than Stoppard's earlier work:  with its focus on family life on the Bakunin estate miles from Moscow, it could well have been called Four Sisters.  The second and third plays are more overtly political:  Shipwreck focuses on Herzen's activties during the failed 1848 revolution in France, while Salvage is set in his  London home, a meeting-place for exiled writers and activists, who argue violently about issues of the day such as the emancipation of the Russian serfs.

The trilogy's overall theme is the doomed quest for a utopian society.  But, this being Stoppard, there are plenty of jokes, verbal misunderstandings and humorous exchanges in amongst the intense political debate - or what he describes as "people shouting at each other".  He's clearly fascinated by the unpredictable Russian character.  "These people have very volatile natures, they turn on a sixpence, they're angry one moment and loving the next."

The plays highlight brilliantly the discrepancy between the characters' messy personal lives and their idealistic political pronouncements.  "To some extent I'm satirising them even while I'm admiring their ideas," Stoppard says.  "I went into it seeing Herzen as a kind of hero, but in fact he was quite flawed, and I think that emerges."  He admits to an empathy with Turgenev, the archetypal liberal:  "I always thought his role would be important, because I identify with him.  I wanted to write about someone who was aware of his own moderation, and is accused of essentially going neither left nor right.  I feel that's rather true of myself."

Interestingly, he uses children - there are several in the trilogy - to up the emotional ante.  "You look for elements that will have a hold on the audience.  When I was young I wasn't interested in that:  I thought an audience should just follow an intellectual argument.  I don't believe that any more, I don't think that alone can carry a play."

Although the dialogue is necessarily his own creation, he's generally stuck closely to actual events and incidents, including the complicated, roller-coaster lives of Herzen and his friends.  "Just occasionally I've fudged the timescale, otherwise there would have been 47 scene changes," he says.  "But I've not invented anything significant."

Paradoxically, his membership of the National's Board turns out to be an inhibiting factor.  "I'm very conscious of how much things cost, so I sit there thinking, I better be careful  here or we'll go over budget.  But Bill Dudley, the designer, is a real tonic, he has such an appetite for challenges.  Do anything you like, he says;  the more people turn up in all sorts of places, the better I like it."

As usual Stoppard looks forward to attending rehearsals.  "Although I like the solitary side of writing - and it's quite hard to pull me out of it - I love rehearsals, because they create such a wonderful community.  I love that feeling of looking at your work on the bench, of there being the text, and then these people have to embody and express it.  I'm not a director, but I'm quite good at technical things, I have quite good instincts.  Of course I have the advantage of having written the play."

He's worked twice before with Trevor Nunn, on Arcadia at the National in 1993, and on Every Good Boy Deserves Favour in 1977.  "Trevor is the great examiner of texts, line by line," he says.  "He's also relentless about not going too far too soon.  With Arcadia I thought, Will we ever start rehearsing?  But the great thing was, when we did start we weren't constantly stopping to ask questions.  We'd done all that."

Unlike some playwrights, Stoppard is prepared to talk critically about a work before he's finished it.  Even now he feels certain structural aspects of the three plays need finessing.  "I think Herzen's development as a political thinker ought to be made more coherent.  I also feel I need to try and mix up more the domestic life and the editorials, to make the arguments grow more out of the characters' daily lives."

Guardian Unlimited

Saturday June 22, 2002

And now, the real thing  (an excerpt)

Czech born but English made, he has dazzled for 35 years with clever plays. Recent work has answered criticism that they lacked heart. Stephen Moss on a writer at the top of his game whose trilogy on the Russian revolution is about to open at the National Theatre

Stoppard has been camped at the National for the past three months, occupying a corner of the rehearsal room where his panoramic treatment of Russian life has been taking shape, answering actors' questions, honing the script, adding a scene at Nunn's request, making the text (an empty thing, he always says, because theatre is an event) live.

Nunn had a triumph with Stoppard's Arcadia in 1993 and knows the form. "Tom sets the bar very high. He doesn't set out to help audiences or feel the need to instruct them, so you have to challenge him about how explicatory he is being. It's daunting stuff for actors - as complex a text as a Shakespeare - but it's also exhilaratingly funny and emotionally demanding." An outing for the heart as well as the mind, which is increasingly important to Stoppard, who is no longer happy to be written of (or indeed off) as "Clever Tom"...

Stoppard says that all his life he has been "overrated", but there is no reason to believe that to be true and it does not make him any less intimidating. He speaks slowly and deliberately, rolling his Rs prodigiously, and is punctilious in observing courtesies. Arcadia must have been an enjoyable play for him to write, for there is no doubt that Regency England would have suited him very well...

Ira Nadel, professor of English at Vancouver University, has just produced a biography of Stoppard (Double Act, Methuen, £25). The professor realised his problem and comes clean about it early on in the book. His subject, who offered little help and refused to read the typescript, doesn't believe in biography. In Stoppard's view, biographers see the past through the wrong end of the telescope. He is equally suspicious of history, its bogus certainty. Stoppard is interested in the bit players in the human drama - like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, lurking furtively on the outer edges of Hamlet - and the people who disappeared from history. The central figure in the new trilogy is Alexander Herzen, the revolutionary history forgot.

In 1968, explaining his approach to theatre in the Sunday Times, Stoppard anticipated his Russian trilogy: "My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather sceptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it. I think I want to write about that lovely group of octogenarians who I believe inhabit a house in Bayswater, who had to flee in 1917 and who are hanging about waiting for the whole thing to blow over so that they can go back."

More than 30 years later he has found his structure: not a group of octogenarians in Bayswater, but a group of revolutionaries and idealists in mid-19th-century Russia - Herzen, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the novelist Ivan Turgenev and the critic Vissarion Belinsky - whose ideas and struggles, centring on the 1848 revolutions, prefigure 1917.

Telegraph

Saturday June 29, 2002

The long voyage of Sir Tom

Tom Stoppard spent four years researching his new trilogy - yet finished it in a last-minute rush. As his 65th birthday looms, the playwright talks to Dominic Cavendish about a lifetime spent battling his perfectionist nature

This Wednesday, Sir Tom Stoppard will turn 65. Given that this coincides with another anniversary - it's 35 years since his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, first took London by storm and made his name overnight - you'd be forgiven for thinking that he'd be in the mood to celebrate, or at least to look back on the story so far.

But not a bit of it. We meet during rehearsals for The Coast of Utopia, his trilogy of new plays tracing the turbulent lives of a group of 19th-century Russian intellectuals. All three are being directed by Trevor Nunn at the National, the scene of his last triumph, The Invention of Love (1997), and many others. When I ask him what he plans to do on his birthday, he riffles through the schedules for a moment, before declaring: "I'll be sitting in the dark watching a run-through of Shipwreck [part two]!"

So, no champagne party then? "I did all that when I was 50," says Sir Tom, who looks in surprisingly good health, considering his regime: "Silk Cut, no exercise, eat what you like and munch sweets all the way through rehearsals!"

Reaching (purely nominal) retirement age is neither a matter of panic or pride for him. "I felt pretty depressed about being 40, but since then I haven't cared," he says. Likewise, anniversaries of plays mean little. "When someone told me it was 35 years since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I thought 'Gosh!'," he says matter-of-factly, as though his reaction ended there and then.

I ask whether any particular achievements stand out when he considers a professional life that has spanned theatre, radio, television and film, imagining that at the very least he'll point to his knighthood (1997) or his Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1999). But he goes quiet: "I can't give you an answer to that, because I don't look back and think 'I'm most pleased with X, Y and Z'."

Trying to coax Stoppard into providing overviews of his life and work is a task that has exercised journalists ever since the dawn of his career, when a reporter asked what his Hamlet spin-off was about. "It's about to make me very rich," came his retort. Another early description of himself as a "bounced Czech" - born Thomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, he reached England after the war - struck a similarly guarded, if equally amusing note.

His private life remains no-go territory. He has never talked about his two failed marriages (the second to the medical pundit Dr Miriam Stoppard) or his eight-year relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. His answer to the question: "Are you currently attached?" is "I reply neither yes nor no"

But the work of the moment, to which he's in thrall, he is prepared to discuss. The Coast of Utopia "is by far the most arduous thing I've done", he reveals. Coming from an autodidact who, with no A-levels or university education, has clambered among many a daunting branch of learning in the past, that's saying something.

For The Invention of Love, about the poet and classics scholar A E Housman, he relearnt Latin and boned up on the techniques of textual analysis. Arcadia (1993), his most widely admired play, stirred together observations on thermodynamics, chaos theory and 18th-century landscape gardening. Stoppard is often described as Britain's cleverest playwright and he has certainly earned the right to that title.

The Coast of Utopia started out in a relatively modest way, he explains. "I had a very abstract desire to write a play in the manner of Chekhov." Reading Russian Thinkers, a collection of essays by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, his interest alighted on the obscure figure of Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic living at the time of the autocratic Tsar Nicholas I. "I was struck by the fact that when it came to a choice, Belinsky preferred to live and work under very severe suppression rather than go to Spain or France where he could read and write anything he liked."

This represented an intriguing paradox, especially for a writer who actively campaigned on behalf of Soviet dissidents during the Seventies and Eighties. But the initial conception changed as more and more historical figures elbowed their way into the frame: chiefly the anarchist Michael Bakunin, Alexander Herzen (man of letters and first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia) and literary giant Ivan Turgenev. Not to mention Karl Marx and the French socialist Louis Blanc. The resulting trilogy involves more than 70 characters, and roams from Moscow and St Petersburg to Paris, Nice and London in its examination of differing quests for a utopian society.

"In the end, my circuits blew," he says. "I have a killer neurosis: the fear of not coming across one vital piece of information that might give me a new dimension. So I overload. That was true of The Invention of Love and Arcadia, too. I end up living for three years with 100 books and, as I get older, I find I have to read them two or three times for anything to stay in my head. Of course, at the end of the whole process, I realised that if I'd known what the essential six books were, these plays could have been on and off a couple of years ago. But I couldn't stop shuffling my pieces around and torturing myself. I ended up writing the third play more or less to a newspaper deadline."

The ability to file in the nick of time seems to have stayed with him from his local journalism days in Fifties' Bristol. Nevertheless, he goes on to make an astounding admission: "It's an awful thing to say, a couple of weeks before we get an audience, but I now feel perfectly positioned to write a play about Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky and Turgenev!" He lets out a loud, slightly manic laugh.

"Even now, sitting in rehearsal, I'm aware that I've got notes that contain things I never used and I'm half-wishing that I had. For instance Herzen, who went into exile in London, said the only thing he got from England was Colman's Mustard and Worcester sauce. I thought, 'God, even at this stage, I must get that in.' It's like one of those pantos. If you mention something very familiar and mundane to an audience, they practically burst into applause. After 10 minutes of social theory, one could pop that in and it would be a tremendous relief to all."

It seems a strange way to set about writing a play, this angsty cramming in of information, this blurring of boundaries between conscientiousness and creativity. For the first time in ages, Stoppard, in pursuing a Chekhovian model, has attempted naturalism, but he has done so by painstakingly academic means.

Why not just set yourself the task of writing something without reference to research, I ask. "That would certainly be an attractive proposition," he agrees drily. "To have a play written in six months rather than four years." In fact, his next project is another trilogy - Stoppard is to write the screen adaptation of Philip Pullman's cult fantasy epic His Dark Materials.

There are cynics who would suggest that when he returns to playwriting again, he won't be able to shed the mantle of erudition. It's a commonplace assertion that audiences are flattered by his plays' displays of learning. An attendant insinuation is that without his hanging onto the coat-tails of real personages or heavyweight ideas, he'd be left stranded. And, though a detectable increase of emotion has crept into his work, the longstanding charge remains that he is too cerebral for his own good.

Because he abstains from giving a full account of himself (a new biography, out this month, has had no encouragement from its subject), and because he sees no connection between his plays ("I feel that more separates them than unites them"), Stoppard is vulnerable to accusations of dilettantism, of going where his intellectual whims takes him.

Yet in his fervent identification with Herzen, now the moral centre of The Coast of Utopia, one finds a pointer both to the creative impulse underlying the trilogy and as good a summation as one is likely to get of the credo behind Stoppard's intellectually nomadic art.

Herzen, he says, grew disillusioned with the vision of the perfect society as laid down by the likes of Marx. "He came to the conclusion that there was no abstract formula at work on our history. There was nothing going on that was inevitable. The big bond between me and him is that he found an appalling arrogance in the way that people might construct an abstract narrative of our society and subordinate the individual life to it. He found that morally repellent."

If there is to be a catch-all description of Tom Stoppard and his work, it is that both blaze with such indignation that catch-all descriptions won't do. We cannot be fixed into tidy, immutable positions. We are far more complicated than that. All of us.