The Coast of Utopia:  Salvage

Stephen Dillane

Financial Times

Monday August 5, 2002

Theatre: At home with men of Russia's history

by Alastair Macaulay

How do we combine the life of the mind with the day-to-day fabric of everyday life? Tom Stoppard's new trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, is about the first generation of the intelligentsia in Russia - the generation of mid-19th-century Russian thinkers for whom the word "intelligentsia" was coined, Bakunin, Belinsky, Turgenev, and (above all) Herzen, men so central to Isaiah Berlin's book, Russian Thinkers. The question that was much asked then, about the future of Russia, was: What is to be done?

Stoppard joins that to simpler question: What is going on? Ideas: meet reality. And so what is extraordinary about The Coast of Utopia is the degree to which each play isn't about their ideas, isn't about their writing, isn't about the climate of Tsarist censorship against which these writers struggled, though all those things are certainly there in good measure.

You can't miss how much each play is about these men's everyday life: Bakunin's sisters, Herzen's wife, the governess to Herzen's children who hands in her resignation. The way the servants are treated, and, above all, the lives and loves of women are crucial threads to the tapestry here. The effect is to show us how living and thinking are intimately interwoven. Affections change, hopes are dashed, people die, kites are flown. We feel how the mind keeps reacting - learning, rejecting, denying, accepting, absorbing.

I find this trilogy beautiful. Watching it for the first time, I found many passages when, while watching, I could not have said what each play was "about", where I could not see where Stoppard was heading; but, after the first play's first half-hour or so, I was happy just luxuriating in the sheer texture of the scenes Stoppard sets before us. Stoppard adores those moments of conjunction when history is like a VIP lounge: where Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara bump into each other (Travesties), where Housman, Wilde, Ruskin, Pater, and Jowett cross paths (The Invention of Love). But I don't think his sense of history has ever been finer - fuller - than here.

Whether his characters are real for all experts on this area I cannot say, but they are real in the sense in which D.H. Lawrence meant when he wrote that "there is always a water-closet on the premises"; in the sense in which Virginia Woolf meant when she asked readers to imagine Shakespeare's sister.

I fell in love with the trilogy during a scene in Act One of Voyage (Part One) when eight different characters are spread across the stage, sitting and talking, all on different wavelengths, about poetry, the weather, philosophy, romance, and the history of a penknife. The scene becomes important later when Belinsky bursts into a passionate speech, but I was already in its thrall.

The plays move from 1833 to 1865. Act One of Voyage, set on the Bakunin country estate, passes from 1833 to 1841; Act Two, set in Moscow and St Petersburg, starts back in 1834, sometimes explaining things that came up in Act One, and ends in 1844.

Shipwreck, Part Two, takes us from Russia to Germany and France - the Russian thinkers have taken up the life of exile - and from 1846 to 1852, though it, too, at one point doubles back to recapture lost times, poignantly.

Stoppard, a good student of Isaiah Berlin, accords full significance to the revolutionary events of 1848; his characters are haunted by them. But they are haunted by their own lives, too.

Salvage, Part Three, set in England and Geneva, moves steadily forwards from 1853 and 1865, and still the characters are coming to terms with the deaths, joys, heartbreaks, loyalties, and disappointments of bygone years.

Briefly, brilliantly, Herzen, who has become the central figure of Shipwreck and Salvage, ties the whole trilogy together in his last great speech: "History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. A distant end is not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be closer, the labourer's wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness."

By this point, we know we have come a mighty distance. The trilogy ends with Herzen, his family, and his friends, watching a storm (past, present, future) in the distance.

Afterwards, one recalls the many tremendous lines Stoppard gives his characters ... "You didn't say anything for weeks, and you, when you say anything, you say - anything"; "I'm a poet of revolution between revolutions"; "Cynicism fills the air like ash and blights the leaves of the freedom trees"; "There's no such thing as 'everyone everywhere'"; "What you mean by civilisation is your way of life".

"It restores one's faith in theatre", said my companion. Trevor Nunn's National Theatre production is superlative. Of its flaws, the only one I find serious is that the voices are amplified, often excessively so.

William Dudley's designs, which make extensive use of video projections, are a miracle of fluency, and there are images - the cityscape of St Petersburg as seen from a moving boat, landscapes that refract as in a kaleidoscope, a summer dress out of a Monet painting, a video of a shipwreck and the whirlpool of the waves - that memorably enrich the world of these plays.

Virtually all the acting is of a very high order, and most of the leading roles take their actors to new peaks in their careers. Guy Henry (Turgenev), Will Keen (Belinsky), Douglas Henshall (Bakunin), John Carlyle, Eve Best, Lucy Whybrow, Charlotte Emmerson, Raymond Coulthard, Felicity Dean all do superbly, and Stephen Dillane, apparently acting with that complete relaxation that Gielgud said was crucial to great acting, makes Herzen the heartbeat of the trilogy, as marvellously natural when he is just listening in a chair as when he is racked by the most powerful emotion.

The meanings of the play cohere as you watch, not as narrative but as poetry, and keep growing in recollection.

Whatsonstage

Monday August 5, 2002

Coast of Utopia

4 stars

by Mark Shenton

On trilogy days - which could be re-titled 'Saturday at the National with Tom' - you can see all three plays in one go, kicking off at 11am and continuing until almost 11pm, including a couple of 75 minute meal breaks (you can also see the plays separately on week nights).

This isn't, of course, the first time the National have invited us to do this - the David Hare trilogy and Tony Kushner's two-part Angels in America also held you in their thrall for the entire day. But both of those events were built separately over time; this is the first occasion that a trilogy, each component individually big, has been premiered at once and in such a massive way, with the same actors appearing in all three plays.

The result is by turns dense and daunting, exhilarating and infuriating. The plays, covering a 33-year time span from 1833 to 1866, embrace a rich canvas of real-life Russian characters as they seek change, both in public politics and in their personal pursuits of love and happiness. The first play, Voyage, introduces us to the ardent future anarchist Michael Bakunin (Douglas Henshall), his family and idealistic friends. These include a would-be writer, Ivan Turgenev (Guy Henry), a literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (Will Keen) and a would-be revolutionary, Alexander Herzen (Stephen Dillane). Stoppard also draws a wonderful, almost Chekhovian portrait of Bakunin's affluent family and life on their country estate, which he leaves behind as he sets forth on a voyage to Germany and the desire to translate thought into action.

In the second play, Shipwreck, the focus shifts to Herzen and the action from Russia to Paris, where - against the backdrop of the 1848 revolution there - the personal becomes political. (It also allows director Trevor Nunn a reprise of his Les Miserables barricade scene). Herzen becomes the mouthpiece for the search for utopia, but even as he strives to reach it, his home life and happiness are shipwrecked in an all-too-real way. Finally, in the third play, Salvage - his family and ideals lost - Herzen finds solace in London amongst a community of Russian exiles, including Bakunin and, seen only briefly, Karl Marx.

Stoppard's has always been a dizzying, even dazzling, talent, and though these plays can feel as if they've been written as much in the research library as they were in the creative furnace, there's also something rich and exciting about his desire to convey so much knowledge and learning. Sometimes reading a book review is a shorthand way of getting a book read for us, so we don't have to - Stoppard has done the same thing for Russian revolutionary thought, distilling the results into a work of art in itself. On the other hand, the whole is greater than the sum of these plays' parts. Because Stoppard has the time, he takes the time, and the resulting drama might have been sharper if it were condensed into only one play.

CurtainUp

Monday August 5, 2002

The Coast of Utopia

Russia - the backwoods - no history but barbarism, no law but autocracy, no glory but brute force, and all those contented serfs! - we're nothing to the world except an object lesson in what to avoid.
-- Vissarion Belinski in Voyage

by Lizzie Loveridge

In his new trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard tackles nineteenth century historical and literary figures, as he did in The Invention of Love, but rather than confining himself to one country and focussing on Russia and the Russian situation, he takes in a broad historical sweep of the men and ideas that led to revolutionary social and political change in Europe. It is a fascinating way to study history, to look at the individuals who helped bring about that change and, in the hands of the erudite Stoppard, it makes for involving drama.

Stoppard's latest plays look at the development of ideas and philosophy in the nineteenth century, at Romanticism and Idealism, the Utopia of his title. It was felt by many that Russia was a special case, that the problems of her society still based on medieval serfdom, would not be solved by reference to Western Europe. The starting point for The Coast of Utopia's first play, Voyage is the Decembrist revolt of 1825. The hard line reaction by the Tsar set up a society of censorship, banishment and imprisonment of any who opposed him.

Voyage, for me the most brilliant of the three, looks at the ideas through the family of Mikhail Bakunin (Douglas Henshall), who eventually embraced anarchism, and the visitors to the Bakunin's country house at Premukhino. The Bakunin family is extensive. Father and country estate owner, Alexander (John Carlisle) is looking for husbands for Bakunin's four sisters, which raises ideas of marrying for love or for economic reasons. Most of Bakunin's fellow thinkers were from the landed classes, men like Alexander Herzen (Stephen Dillane) whose story dominates the second play Shipwreck and the last play Salvage. We meet too the aspiring writer, Ivan Turgenev (Guy Henry) and all too briefly before he is killed in a duel, Alexander Pushkin (Jack James). An exception is Vissarion Belinsky (Will Keen) who was a literary critic from a very poor background who was with Bakunin in the circle of students in Moscow in the 1830s which included the philosopher Nicholas Stankevich (Raymond Coulthard) and the historian Timofei Granovsky (Iain Mitchell).

If the first play is about the imagination of the development of a fairer society, the second, Shipwreck, sees many of those ideas drown with the failure of the Europe wide revolutions of 1848 and the exile of many from both Russia and Germany. Man was not as Rousseau had hoped, "born to be free". On a personal level too, we see Herzen's marriage to the vivacious and intelligent Natalie Herzen (Eve Best) flounder when she has a dalliance with the German radical poet, George Herwegh (Raymond Coulthard), and the tragic drowning of the Herzens' deaf son Kolya (Padraig Goodall/Matthew Thomas-Davies/David Perkins).

In the last play, Salvage, the last half of which rivals Voyage, we see how the emigré population of London keep resistance alive in Poland and Russia, print books and pamplets and eventually return to (albeit temporarily) more liberal regimes. This first half of this last play seems overly concerned with Herzen's domestic arrangements for his motherless children after the death of his wife but comes into its own in the final scenes. The schism is wrought, Herzen favours slow continuous progress. He is dubbed a liberal by the Marxists who cling to the idea of a revolution which will sweep away the old order and result in the dictatorship of the proletariat on the path to socialism, while the anarchists and the nihilists want to sweep all old order away. Russia achieves the emancipation of the serfs but with no land rights, the peasants are as without hope as they ever were.

Stoppard's plays can be enjoyed at myriad levels. Although there are different characters to deal with, played by the same members of this cast, Trevor Nunn has ensured that they look and sound different, so as not to add to the complexity. If you have a background in Russian history, there are many in-jokes to enjoy, many more than those that I fear I understood. For example, when Mikhail Bakunin says, "What is to be done?" he is of course pre-empting the title of Lenin's famous book. If you have no such background, Stoppard has laced his play with wit and fun accessible to all, the wife who objects to an offensive word in a sentence which contains the words bourgeois and anus to have her husband apologise and say "middle class" instead. Often it is the juxtaposition of high flown ideas with the mundane punch line which delights, Mikhail Bakunin:
"The life of the Spirit is the only real life: our everyday existence stands between us and our transcendence to the Universal Idea where we become one with the Absolute! Do you see? . . . . God, I'm starving."
Overall, the quality of the writing is matchless, explaining complex philosophy with ease without talking down to us and sounding like television made for children.

Trevor Nunn's direction, recalling both his recent productions of Gorky's Summerfolk and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, gives us the silent, leg ragged, bearded, downward looking serfs waiting in the background to remind us of the oppressed substructure supporting the lifestyle of the Russian gentry. His direction is beautifully assured and this play will be remembered as the pinnacle of his art as he leaves the National Theatre next Spring. Visually it is exciting. There is brilliant use of the turning, circular stage, for the pleasure of ice skating to conveying political turmoil. Scene changes are beautifully executed with the shifters in character. The play opens with music and laughter and the Bakunin family seated at dinner twirling round in an evocation of a happy time in 1833. Later a clever picnic scene recreates Edouard Manet's shocking Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe as the naked Natalie Herzen surprises her future, fully dressed lover, out of doors. Shocking is the gunshot and the bleak monochromatic, snow covered landscape that is the death of Pushkin and the tragic loss of his beautiful poetry. The recreation of the barricades for the 1848 Parisian revolt reminds us that Nunn was the original director of the stage hit Les Misérables. The projected backdrops of William Dudley's design pleased me, taking us to the Place de la Concorde in Paris, to St Petersburg, to silver birches by the side of the Russian country house, to the lapping water of Lake Geneva, to the cliffs at the Isle of Wight and many more, creating an authenticity of place and mood. Costume is of the usual high standard at the National and the characters age effectively, succumbing to hair loss and portliness.

Of the performances, Stephen Dillane never disappoints and here gives the enormous single role of Alexander Herzen an intelligence, a humanity which is credible and enormously likeable. Herzen as a thinker seems a man ahead of his time. Will Keen is terrific as the socially inept and consumptive Belinsky who has political vision. His racking, tubercular cough is like nothing I have heard in the theatre. Douglas Henshall, too, shows a brilliant stage presence as the buffeted but surviving Bakunin, whose life full of revolutionary activity led to imprisonment and escape, worthy of a drama all his own. Lanky and langurous, Guy Henry plays the misunderstood Turgenev in all three plays. I was delighted by Charlotte Emmerson's three very separate performances as sad wife Varenka; Herwegh's emigré wife in reduced circumstances and Maria Sutherland, London girl of the streets and mistress to Nicholas Ogarev (Simon Day). My one criticism of the otherwise excellent casting concerns Eve Best. While she is very convincing and different as the sister who loves Georges Sands' novels, Liubov Bakunin, and the German emigré and disciplinarian governess, Malwina von Meysenburg, she disappoints in the key role in Shipwreck of the enigmatic Natalie Herzen.

With each play lasting almost three hours, seeing all three in a day, although they make for a very special day, made me feel that I did not have the concentration to do full justice to Tom Stoppard's work on first viewing. The text was only available yesterday, so a preview reading was not possible. Each play has been written to stand alone. After the first play Voyage, I felt that I had seen a new work by Chekhov, only one which was much more hopeful. The second play Shipwreck is less dramatic, maybe some of its disappointment is to do with its subject matter of disillusionment and lost ideals? In the first half of the final play, Salvage I felt side tracked by Herzen's child care arrangements but the last half brilliantly draws together the progress of ideas and presages the bloody Russian revolution and Stalinism.

The Coast of Utopia
Written by Tom Stoppard
Directed by Trevor Nunn

Set, costume and video designed by William Dudley
Starring: Stephen Dillane, Douglas Henshall, Guy Henry, Will Keen, Raymond Coulthard, Charlotte Emmerson, Eve Best
With: John Carlisle, Felicity Dean, Lucy Whybrow, Anna Maxwell Martin, Jennifer Scott Malden, Jack James, John Nolan, Janet Spencer-Turner, Janne Duvitski, Jonathan Slinger, Simon Day, Paul Ritter, Nick Sampson, Rachel Ferjani, Iain Mitchell, Sam Troughton, David Verrey, Jasmine Hyde, Martin Chamberlain, Richard Hollis, Thomas Arnold, Sarah Manton, Kemal Sylvester, Lewis Crutch, Freddie Hale, Thomas Moll, Greg Sheffield, Padraig Goodall, Matthew Thomas Davies, David Perkins, Dominic Barklem, Alexander Green, William Green, Ashley Jones, Clemmie Hooton, Alice Knight, Harriet Lunnon, Casi Toy, Alexandra Thomas-Davies, Francesca Markham, Samantha Thompson, Madeleine Edis, Ruth Jones, Charlotte Nott Macaire
Lighting Designer: David Hersey
Sound Designer: Paul Groothuis
Movement Director: David Bolger
Music: Steven Edis
Running time: Each play - Two hours 55 minutes with one interval
Box Office: 020 7452 3000
Booking to 19th October 2002
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 3rd August 2002 performances at the Olivier, National Theatre, South Bank London SE1 (Tube Station: Waterloo)

Telegraph

Monday August 5, 2002

Excellent in parts but less than Utopian

by Charles Spencer

At marathon performances of Tom Stoppard's new trilogy, you enter the Olivier at 11am and stagger out some 12 hours later.

In that time the action ranges from 1834 to 1865, from Russia to Paris and from London to Geneva. You encounter 70 characters and receive such a thorough crash course in the philosophy and revolutionary politics of the 19th century that you could probably successfully sit an Open University degree on the subject.

Now 65, Stoppard will be accused by no one of having diminished ambition. Yet as someone who has always revered Stoppard, it pains me to report that there are long, long stretches of The Coast of Utopia that appear to have been written with perspiration rather than inspiration. And the result is that this baggy monster of a production is too often an exhausting sweat for the audience too.

There is much to admire. Individual lines and scenes that are as funny, or as moving, as anything Stoppard has written. But there is also an unexpected ponderousness, a feeling that the dramatist, who has admitted that his "circuits blew" during his exhaustive research, has been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material he feels he has to convey.

It has often been said that Stoppard flatters audiences into feeling cleverer than they actually are. Here he sometimes succeeds in making you feel more stupid. There are so many characters and relationships to get hold of, such a relentless flow of words and ideas, that there were times when I feared my own circuits would blow.

And when the Russian author Turgenev declares towards the end of a particularly punishing act: "No, no . . . oh, no, no, no . . . No! No more blather please. Blather, blather, blather. Enough," you know exactly how he feels and want to give him a hearty round of applause.

To describe this epic is necessarily to oversimplify it, but Stoppard's basic thesis, which will not surprise those who know his attitudes and his previous work, is that utopian ideals will never be achieved on this earth while human nature remains what it is.

In the course of the three plays, we meet, among scores of others, the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the founder of Russian Populism Alexander Herzen, the passionate literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and the novelist Turgenev. We also meet their parents, wives, lovers, children, comrades, associates and rivals, and it is the devil's own job trying to keep tabs on them all as the years pass and the locations shift.

The dramatic fulcrum is provided by the French revolution of 1848, which promised to begin the fulfilment of most of the characters' dreams but which ended in the triumph of the bourgeoisie and, within four years, the restoration of Empire. "The people are more interested in potatoes than freedom," Herzen gloomily concluded.

This often over-earnest political dissertation began with Stoppard's attempt to write a play in the manner of Chekhov and one often wishes he had stuck to his guns. The first act of the first play, Voyage, set on the Bakunin family's estate, offers delightful comedy in the Chekhovian style, as the characters squabble over the lunch table, fall in love and confront mortality with the death of one of Bakunin's sisters.

Later in the play, however, private lives too often take second place to public debate, which is often numbingly repetitive. The director Trevor Nunn, who generally offers a fluent, lucid, marvellously acted production - greatly helped by William Dudley's designs, which establish the varied locations with outstanding use of slide and video projections - could usefully have done more work as a script editor.

Yet if The Coast of Utopia is more like a vast curate's egg than a fully achieved epic masterpiece, parts of it are truly excellent. Amid the politics and the philosophising and some characteristic Stoppard one-liners (the trouble with the army, Bakunin insists, is that it's "obsessed with playing soldiers"), the trilogy also offers moments that catch at the heart.

The grief experienced by Herzen and his wife, Natalie, over the death by drowning of their young, deaf son is extraordinarily affecting, especially in the context of so much theoretical speculation. One day someone should write a thesis on the beautiful influence of children in Stoppard's work. Beyond the exhausting flow of words in this dramatic history lesson, there is no mistaking the humanity of the playwright's vision.

The character of the increasingly sceptical Herzen, played with a thrilling mixture of eloquence and emotion by Stephen Dillane, becomes a mouthpiece for Stoppard's own views. Observing the often fraught relationships among his own family and circle, he remarks, in one of the key lines of the play: "If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us" - surely the dernier mot on utopian politics.

But characteristically, Stoppard salvages something from the wreck of his characters' political dreams. "A distant end is not an end but a trap," Herzen concludes in the trilogy's final scene. "The end we work for must be closer - the labourer's wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness."

In its mixture of clear-eyed realism and the belief that life, for all its trials, is still worth the candle, this strikes me as being both beautiful and profound. As well as Dillane's spellbindingly humane and articulate performance, which comes heroically close to focusing this diffuse, uneven trilogy, there is much strong support elsewhere.

Eve Best is astonishingly moving as Herzen's devoted, yet also unfaithful wife, providing glimpses of raw emotion that are worth a thousand words. Douglas Henshall hilariously captures the bumptious but also strangely endearing egotism of Bakunin, John Carlisle provides a richly comic and also deeply touching performance as his crusty, loving father, and Will Keen offers a comic tour de force as the fiery, accident-prone critic, Belinsky.

It's a matter of history that so many of the characters for whom one feels most warmth die early in the proceedings, but it certainly adds to the play's poignant evocation of the unpredictable transience of life. Nevertheless, on Stoppard's terms, this awesomely ambitious dramatic canvas must be counted a courageous failure rather than a knock-out success.

His normal practice is to transport an audience with delight. Here I left the theatre feeling that I had too often been bludgeoned into weary submission.

The Stage

Thursday August 8, 2002

The Coast of Utopia – Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage

by John Thaxter

The over-arching theme of Tom Stoppard's three consecutive plays, superbly staged by Trevor Nunn, is the doomed quest for a utopian society amid the ferment of revolutionary ideas which swept through Europe in the years between 1833 and 1865.

Stoppard sets his trilogy against a Tsarist Russian backdrop of fear and rigid censorship. But his broad canvas also embraces public and private scenes in a wide variety of European locales, lit by David Hersey and brought to dynamic life by designer Bill Dudley, whose three-dimensional video images place the real-life characters in the theatrical equivalent of a vast computer game.

Five years ago, inspired by his work on a Chekhov translation, Stoppard planned to write a play in the Russian manner with the socialist philosopher Alexander Herzen as its hero, a would-be revolutionary who ended as a liberal, embracing progressive peasant freedom rather than bloodshed as the true historical imperative.

In Stephen Dillane's wonderfully watchable performance, Herzen remains the compelling central figure of the trilogy, a visionary like some mid-century Vershinin or Astrov, a droll but reluctant romantic whose life, work and ambitions become tragically shipwrecked in every sense.

But Stoppard's research, drawing on many sources including Isaiah Berlin's studies of Russian thinkers, also led him to the turbulent life of anarchist Michael Bakunin, a wayward nobleman played here with shaggy, bear-hugging grandeur by Douglas Henshall.

Prominent among his many other characters is the literary critic Belinsky in a dazzling portrayal by Will Keen, a social disaster who combines an incisive intellect with his shy clumsiness. Most strikingly Guy Henry plays the liberal writer Ivan Turgenev – tall and elegant, he is a shrewd and witty observer of his Russian contemporaries. Stoppard now had enough political and biographical material for a trilogy.

The first, most self-contained play Voyage could be subtitled Four Sisters – played by rising stars Eve Best, Charlotte Emmerson, Lucy Whybrow and Jennifer Scott Malden.

Set on a remote country estate, it focuses on the family life of the Bakunins led by patriarch John Carlisle, with Best as the eldest sister Liubov. The play moves on to St Petersburg for deftly staged ice skating on the Olivier revolve, the hazards of subversive politics and an enigmatic fancy-dress ball, closing with a symbolic rural sunset.

In the second play, Shipwreck, the action shifts from Russia to Paris, introduced by stunning images of the Place de la Concorde and a heaped-up street barricade reminding us of Nunn's work on Les Miserables, here with tricolour-clad drummers marching on the seat of government, burning and looting as they go. But there is also an intriguing interrogation scene in a gaol in Saxony, as Henshall's Bakunin sacrifices his personal freedom for his anarchist ideals.

Finally in Salvage, Dillane's Herzen, now a bereaved husband and father, finds some temporary solace in London – first with his children's German governess, then with his best friend's wife – while gradually evolving a new philosophy that necessarily remains unresolved in his final encounter with Karl Marx.

Independent

Monday August 5, 2002

Stoppard's magnificent spectacle - just the five hours too long

by Paul Taylor

The statistics are imposing. Five years in the writing and half his lifetime in the gestation, Tom Stoppard's massive trilogy The Coast of Utopia, finally had its world première at the National Theatre at the weekend. The West End being ever-more dominated with big- budget vehicles for Hollywood stars, this was the event of the year for Britain's subsidised theatre.

In Trevor Nunn's fluent production, handsome video projections and whirling computer- generated images spirit us around the many locations; the Paris of the 1848 revolution – the verandah of a house in Nice; a promenade in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight etc – where these men and women, doomed to exile for their beliefs, fetch up.

A cast of more than 30 actors go through more than 160 costume changes as they impersonate 70-plus characters. It's not a project you can accuse of thinking small. Yet as you sit through the mighty marathon, a voice inside starts to insist, early on, that there are occasions when more is less and that this is one of them.

Stoppard admits to being constitutionally exhaustive in his research and for needing to reach a point of despair before he begins to compose a piece. With The Coast of Utopia, though, the diligent researcher is too often in evidence at the expense of the playwright.

The trilogy is, throughout, intelligent, lucid, eloquent and enlivened by the author's wit and eye for the absurd (when the abstraction-junkie Bakunin declares that, "Freedom is a state of mind", he's put down with the drily realistic rejoinder, "No, it's a state of not being locked up").

But the plays (entitled Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage) are like an over-inclusive crash-survey of the period, a theatrical supplement to one of Stoppard's prose-sources, Isaiah Berlin's book Russian Thinkers, rather than a drama that's ruthlessly prepared to throw material overboard in the interests of its tighter development.

The soul and conscience of the piece is Alexander Herzen. Played with an elegantly impassioned intelligence by Stephen Dillane, Herzen is the wealthy nobleman's son who winds up founding the Free Russian Press in London after a career that has embraced six years of imprisonment, internal exile and a sojourn in Paris that left him deeply disgusted by the dashed hopes of the 1848 revolution as the Second Republic turned into the Empire of Napoleon III.

Through this shrewdly humane anti-Utopian, The Coast of Utopia gives voice to a philosophy of moderation dear to Stoppard's heart: respect for the individual over the collective and hatred for theories of history that sanctify the bloody sacrifice of the present as a necessary step towards some blissful illusory destination.

The attractiveness of Herzen's position poses problems for the debate-side of the proceedings. Stoppard's plays have a tendency to lapse into disguised monologues, and though the playwright gives some good lines to the hero's interlocutors – who include Douglas Henshall's comically self-involved proto-anarchist Bakunin; Guy Henry's languidly liberal novelist, Turgenev; and Sam Troughton's fierily posturing, anti-Western Slavophile, Aksakov – there's never much danger of Herzen being put on the spot and the drama on its mettle.

The trilogy puts you in touch with what its characters think and believe. It is less successful at pulling you into their nervous system and making you appreciate what it must be to be them. One exception is the portrayal of the literary critic,Vissarion Belinsky (played with a wonderful mix of timidity and explosive conviction by Will Keen) which truly demonstrates how, in a society where literature was the one channel for disseminating ideas, a bad book could drive a man to apoplectic violence.

The National Theatre must have been hoping that The Coast of Utopia would be seen as the crowning glory of Trevor Nunn's artistic directorship, just as the David Hare trilogy was rightly regarded as the high-water mark of his predecessor, Richard Eyre. But the contrast between these events is instructive.

In his anatomy of English institutions, Hare was urgently addressing current concerns. But Stoppard's trilogy does not feel hot off the press. Indeed, though it happens to have been completed and premièred after the collapse of communism, The Coast of Utopia could just as easily have been written before that.

Guardian Unlimited

Monday August 5, 2002

The Coast of Utopia

4 stars out of 5

by Michael Billington

As you might expect, Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia in the Olivier is a bundle of contradictions. Comprising three three-hour plays, it is heroically ambitious and wildly uneven. It opens up the subject of revolution while being politically partial. And it contains passages of breathtaking beauty and surprising ordinariness. But I wouldn't have missed it for worlds and at its heart it contains a fascinating lesson about the nature of drama.

Like Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers, Stoppard leaves you in no doubt that Herzen is his hero. According to Berlin, Herzen believed that any dedication to an abstract ideal leads to victimisation and human sacrifice. So Stoppard presents Herzen as a man who rejects romantic anarchy in favour of practical reform and the emancipation of the serfs. Even when that turns out to be a disappointment, he retains his belief in achievable ends: "The labourer's wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness."

Stoppard loads the dice in favour of Herzen, beautifully played by Stephen Dillane, but the fact is that his rationalist moderation is dramatically unexciting. The great paradox is that Stoppard's trilogy comes most alive when dealing with characters he intellectually disowns, in particular Bakunin. Capriciously switching his allegiance from one German philosopher to another, cadging off all his friends and both defying and living off his estate-owning father, Bakunin is a rootless anarchist who believes in the "abolition of the state by the liberated workers". Stoppard condemns his ideas, but Bakunin, magnificently played by Douglas Henshall, takes over the trilogy as surely as Falstaff dominates Shakespeare's Henry IV.

The moral is that dramatic energy is more important than historical correctness, which makes me regret all the more that Stoppard marginalises the most visionary of all the revolutionary exiles, Karl Marx. But it seems harsh to criticise Stoppard for what he has left out when he has put so much in. In particular, he dramatises the capacity for change so that Will Keen's brilliantly feverish Belinsky begins by arguing in the 1830s that Russia has no literature and ends by claiming that it carries too many burdens. Stoppard also conveys the ambivalent role of women in revolutionary circles with Eve Best, who transforms herself from one of Bakunin's sexually innocent sisters to Herzen's free-loving wife and eventually the strict governess to his children.

Stoppard's vision is expertly realised in Trevor Nunn's production, apart from a descent into Les Mis-style flag-waving in 1848, and in William Dudley's projections. The stage is cleared for epic and intimate events, while in the background we see revolving vistas of everything from pine-filled Russian estates to an ice-covered Richmond Park. In the end Stoppard argues, with excessive hindsight, that Herzen was right and the romantic Utopians were wrong. But revolutionary fervour has its own unstoppable dramatic momentum, and it is their very wrongness that gives the trilogy its theatrical life.

Times

Monday August 5, 2002

Long view of Stoppard's triple vision

3 out of 5 stars

by Benedict Nightingale

The London Theatre Guide - Online

Saturday August 3, 2002

Coast of Utopia:
Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage

at the Olivier, NT

by Alan Bird

The world premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” which comprises three sequential but self-contained plays: Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, opened today at the National Theatre. The plays are directed by Trevor Nunn who also directed Stoppard’s “Arcadia” at the National that was the winner of the 1994 Laurence Olivier Award for best play.

The cast reads like a role call of great theatrical stars: Stephen Dillane, John Carlisle, Eva Best, Douglas Henshall, Lucy Whybrow and many more. Throughout the three plays the acting was excellent, and there was not one bad performance the whole day.

The trilogy follows the exploits of a group of Russian intelligentsia that lament against the backwardness of Tsarist Russia and seek solace in Schelling, Kant, Fichte and Hegel. However, the realities of life in Tzarist Russia turns them from passive philosophers that merely seeks to understand the world into revolutionaries who wish to change it. As one of the characters says, “Poverty, injustice, censorship, whips and scorns, the law’s delays? The Minister for Public Instruction? Russia? …How did we miss it?”

This epic drama of Russian exiled romantics and revolutionaries spread over three plays and nine hours is great literature. Stoppard is a master wordsmith whose lyrical skill with words and ideas makes for exquisite theatre. One is treated to a utopian journey of theatrical delights. Like any utopia it cannot completely satisfy and as one makes the nine-hour journey, there are times when you feel shipwrecked upon the shores of boredom and triviality. However, it is not long before the play is salvaged and one continues the voyage!

The Stage design is simple and elegant. Lighting is used to project images of houses, countryside and even the La Place de la Concorde in Paris, on to white panels that circulate the back of the stage. This allows for some marvellous settings, with very little in the way of props. Furniture is quickly moved on and off the stage effortlessly, which allows one scene to flow smoothly to the next.

Each of the three plays are self-contained and there is no need to see all three, though I personally would advise that you do so. However, if you decide not to see the whole trilogy, then I would definitely recommend you see the first play “Voyage”, which is by far the superior. “Shipwreck” also stands by itself, and is worth a visit. However, avoid “Salvage”, it is the most leisurely of the three plays in pace and you will certainly be impeded from obtaining the most enjoyment from this play if you have not seen the other two.

Voyage:
The story begins in the home of Alexander Bakunin, who is celebrating the betrothal of his daughter Liubov to Baron Rene, a cavalry officer. During this celebration his son Michael suddenly returns and quickly brings chaos to the family home.

Michael is a romantic who is adored by his sisters whom he instructs in the philosophy of Idealism. He believes himself to be above such earthly passions as physical love and family kinship. Michael hates egoism and yet his narcissistic shadow oppresses his family and friends. At one point his mother says in despair “Now he thinks he is God!” When Michael later discovers Ficht’s philosophy, it comes as no surprise to hear him say, “The world is nothing but the impress of my Self. The Self is everything; it’s the only thing. At last a philosophy that makes sense!” That is until he discovers Hegel.

Michael’s sisters, despite his attempts to persuade them of the virtues of romantic idealism, are instead infatuated by the more earthly romantic desires that they read about in the novels of George Sands. Liubov is in love with Nicholas Stankevich, whilst Tatiana admires Balinsky, two of Michael’s friends. This mixture of idealism and romance lends itself to some wonderfully charming and comical moments.

However, this mixture of idealism and denial of earthly realities begins to loose its attraction when Michael and his philosophically inclined friends have to deal with the realities of life in Tzarist Russia. When Balinsky, a literary critic, publishes an article by the philosopher Peter Chaadaev that attacks the backwardness of Russian society he soon attracts the attention of the secret police. Michael discovers that deserting his army post does little to liberate his ‘free’ spirit or earn his fathers approval and more importantly wealth.

Finally, we are introduced to the revolutionary Alexander Herzan. Herzan with his original thinking and compassionate concern for the welfare of Russia, especially that of the Russian serfs quickly explains how Hegelian philosophy is not idealist but instead is about the inevitable clash of people against the absurdities of history. He exclaims, “Hegel is the algebra of revolution!”

Shipwreck:
Alexander Herzan travels to Paris to be at the heart of the revolutionary fever that is beginning to rage across Europe. He, along with Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin and others rejoice at the revolution that once again establishes France as a republic. However, Herzal’s [editor's note:  the author meant Herzen] rejoicing soon turns to despair as the republic turns its back on the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity. It is not long before revolutionary slogans are once again heard on the streets of Paris and violence erupts. The bloodshed and the anarchy that ensues, sickens Herzal. He turns his back on ‘social scientific’ progress, seeing them as the fantasies of the interfering intelligentsia who dictate to the masses the best way to over throw their oppressors and organise society.

Just has Herzal is disappointed by the events in Paris, so his own personal life takes a similar down turn. His wife Natalie is a romanticist who idealises love. A love that is willing to break with family, friends, reputation etc, to be true to itself. When George Herwegh, a radical poet and his wife Emma move into Herzal’s home he plays upon Natalie’s ideals and she falls in love with him.

Herzal is forced into self-exile, no longer welcome in Russia, and not wanted in Paris. Like many of the revolutionary leaders of 19th century Europe he travels to London. On his way he meets up with the anarchist Michael Bukunin who is himself in exile and travelling to London. On the boat Bakunin asks Herzal “Where is the map?” to which Herzal replies “Nobody’s got the map. In the West, socialism may win next time, but it is not histories destination. Socialism, too, will reach its own extremes and absurdities, and once more Europe will burst at the seams. … Are you sorry for civilisation? I am sorry for it, too?”

Salvage:
Alexander Herzal is in self-exile in London after the failures of the French Revolution. His home becomes a meeting point for the seemingly countless number of revolutionaries who seek a safe-haven in London, Karl Marx, Michael Bukunin, Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Arnold Ruge etc.

His family routine is interrupted with the arrival of Nicholas and Natalie Ogarev. Natalie used to be the best friend of Alexander’s deceased wife and instantly begins to interfere with the raising of the children. Nicholas is also Alexander’s best friend, ever since the time, when they where only 13 years old and they made a vow to revenge the Decemberists: a Russian revolutionary group that was mercilessly destroyed by the Tzar.

Gradually, Natalie and Alexander fall in love. Nicholas meanwhile has fallen in love with Mary Sutherland, a prostitute with which he fathers a son, Henry. However, it is not long before Natalie becomes racked by guilt, convinced that Nicholas has turned to drink because of her actions and that she has betrayed the trust of her dead friend Natalie Hergez, Alexander’s deceased wife. Natalie becomes more and more hysterical and the family home becomes a miserable prison for all of them.

Alexander, however, is able to find escape in the meetings of the exiled revolutionaries that continue in his home. He pays for the setting up of a free Polish and also a free Russian press. For the first time, revolutionary material that has been censured in Russia is being published and smuggled into the country. However, this does not please all of Alexander’s former comrades in Russia. Alexander is now calling for peaceful progress and is using the Russian Free Press to make appeals for the Tzar to emancipate the serf’s before violent revolution drowns Russia in a chaotic sea of blood.

Alexander finds himself no longer considered a radical let alone a revolutionary. As he grows older, the younger generation of radicals grow bolder in their dreams of a bloody socialist revolution. He uses his energy to warn of the dangers of replacing one dictatorship, that of the Tzar, for another, the revolutionary leaders. In his meeting with the Russian revolutionary Chernyshevesky he warns, “Who will do the organising? Oh, but of course! – you will! The revolutionary elite.” He goes on to say, “What if the peasants don’t want you? … Will you coerce them for their own good? Will you be their little Father? You’ll need some help. You might have to have your own police force.”

The whole cast is superb in all three plays. Stephen Dillane gives a marvellous performance as Alexander Herzen. He keeps a calm nobility about him, as he gradually becomes a lone voice warning of the danger of believing that one can organise society and the people in it according to philosophical schemes and dreams. Douglas Henshall is phenomenal as Michael Bakunin. He plays the character with great zeal, sincerity and with an air of eccentricity and boundless optimism. He is the courageous fool who comes into conflict with those around them, but whose intrepidity makes him none the less endearing.

Eve Best as Natalie Herzal gives a warm, loving, and lamenting performance. Raymond Coulthard also gives a great performance as George, the egotistical, spoilt poet who naively seeks to be idolised. Will Keen plays the part of Belinsky with a wonderful mixture of trepidation, animation and fervour. Also worth mentioning is Ian Mitchell who is marvellous as the kind, genteel philosopher Peter Chaadaev.