Stephen Dillane

Chicago Tribune

Friday December 6, 2002

Stoppard's 'Utopia' a sweeping achievement  (an excerpt)

by Richard Christiansen

LONDON -- The ever-busy world of London theater this season has produced two important premieres by two singular playwrights, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill. Their vastly different new works -- Stoppard's running a little over nine hours and Churchill's clocking in at a mere 55 minutes -- are certain to have United States productions, and when they get to America, they are sure to cause a stir.

Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," which has just closed its run at the Royal National Theatre, is actually a trio of sequential but self-contained three-hour plays: "Voyage," "Shipwreck" and "Salvage."

Imaginative and intellectual

Like all of Stoppard's work, the trilogy is literary and literate; and, as with many of his earlier dramas, this one casts real-life historical figures in the playwright's imaginative unfolding of intellectual and cultural history. The time frame here is 1833 to 1868, and the protagonists are pre-Communist activists striving to move their backward Mother Russia from czarist repression into a brave new world of freedom.

They all begin as bright young "revolutionaries with secret arsenals of social theory," and the survivors end as aged, scarred warriors still looking for that better world to come.

Ever the diligent researcher, Stoppard has peppered their personal histories with information on the political and philosophical movements of their time. Indeed, with its long monologues and stretches of polite, sophisticated debate, "Utopia" sometimes seems less like a play of action than a showcase for a brilliant, if somewhat longwinded, lecturer.

But playgoers need not prepare for "Utopia" as if studying for a history exam. The people of the drama are not encyclopedia entries; they are individual human beings, with distinguishing traits and flaws, who live in a richly evoked place and time. Moreover, Stoppard's abiding humanism and dazzling use of the English language give a dynamic contemporary thrust to these 19th Century issues.

Superb direction

In this extraordinary effort, he was helped immeasurably by the epic proportions of director Trevor Nunn's magnificent production. Using a giant turntable in the National's Olivier auditorium, Nunn swiftly carried the story from Russia to France to Switzerland and back, with designer William Dudley's video projections, thrown on a huge background cyclorama, adding amazing depth to every scene.

The New Yorker

Monday September 16, 2002

A Stoppard Panorama of Russian Idealism 

by Benedict Nightingale

"When in doubt, speculate. Enter the picture," Tom Stoppard has said. In his ambitious trilogy about prerevolutionary intellectual life in Russia, "The Coast of Utopia" (at London's Royal National Theatre), which requires thirty actors, two hundred and seventy-one costumes, and more than nine hours, Stoppard has imagined himself into the sect of renegade mid-nineteenth-century thinkers for whom the word "intelligentsia" was coined, and whose heady debates about their homeland's moral, intellectual, and political vacuum sowed the seeds of revolution both in the Russian Empire and far beyond its borders. His saga is battened primarily to four major figures: the essayist Alexander Herzen (1812-70), whom Sir Isaiah Berlin called "a kind of Russian Voltaire," the equal of Marx and Tocqueville as a social observer but as a moralist "more interesting and original than either"; the novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-83); the literary critic and Savonarola of his generation Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48); and the agitator Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76). From their lives and ideas, Stoppard, whose plays were at one time banned in the Soviet Union, manufactures an epic whose greatest achievement is to show history as irony on the move.

"With fearless step we march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the dialectic, only with the truth," wrote Herzen, who saw the oppression of the tsarist state as the problem and a democratic revolution as the solution. "We have to open men's eyes and not tear them out," he explains in the play. Inevitably, Stoppard is drawn to the amiable Herzen, who shares with him a certain intellectual gaiety, a gentleness, and the ability to turn ambivalence into artful expression, if not always effective action. Although Herzen (the poised, excellent Stephen Dillane) does not appear until the second part of the first play in the trilogy, "Voyage," his story and his gnarly inquiry into social change form the core of "The Coast of Utopia." "Voyage," which is the most fragmented of the three plays, dramatizes the infection of German Romantic idealism among the Russian upper classes of the eighteen-thirties. (Russia's censorship of political expression gave new ideas the status of holy dogma but also encouraged an absolutist frame of mind—which in the end proved equally disastrous.) The women acted it out in romance, the men in revolution. "Shipwreck," the second and most successful play, embraces exile, the growth of Russian social criticism between 1846 and 1852, and the revolutionaries' disappointment at the failure of the Paris Revolt of 1848, along with the death of Herzen's wife and son and his subsequent move to England. Stoppard is at his best when lampooning the cultural division between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. "Go to France for your cravats if you must, but why do you have to go to France for your ideas?" one Slavophile says. To which Turgenev (the lanky, droll Guy Henry) replies, "Because they're in French. You can publish anything you like in France, extraordinary." The third play, "Salvage," deals with the rise and fall of Herzen's newspaper, The Bell, the first significant Russian publication to lob revolutionary ideas into the motherland, and with the reaction of the new generation of revolutionaries, who believe in progress through the application of scientific principles, to the "men of the forties." (Despite Stoppard's claim to the contrary, the plays, to my mind, need to be seen in historical sequence.)

Scratch a rebel and you'll find money from home. Except for the provincial Belinsky (superbly played by Will Keen), who has to earn his crust by writing literary reviews, the revolutionaries in Stoppard's tale are men of inherited means—the "repentant gentry," as Turgenev piquantly puts it—who are all too aware that what's good for the pike is death to the minnow. "Guilt was the psychological inspiration of the revolution," Orlando Figes writes in his masterly history "A People's Tragedy." In the best scene in "Voyage," Herzen sits at an ice rink in 1834, watching festive skaters and fulminating to a university friend, the philosopher Nicholas Stankevich (Raymond Coulthard), about the disparity between the frivolous surface of Moscow life and its barbarous reality. "The Kritski brothers disappeared for insulting the Tsar's portrait," he says. "Antonovich and his friends for forming a secret society, meaning they met in somebody's room to read a pamphlet you can buy on the street in Paris. Young men and women are pairing off like swans on the skating ground. There is something wrong with this picture."

What's wrong with Stoppard's stage picture is that the drama is in the wings; what's onstage is just talk. Stankevich uses Hegelian categories to detach himself from the horror that Herzen denounces. "Reform can't come from above or below, only from within," he says. "The material world is nothing but the shadow on the wall of the cave." Perhaps because Stoppard's interest lies in the history of ideas and not in social history, Trevor Nunn's production adopts a similar strategy. Its hubbub—a revolving stage; the shifting panels of a cyclorama onto which William Dudley's sumptuous video locations are projected; the ballroom gavottes and the revolutionary hoopla—camouflages the stasis at the core of the play. The arbitrary brutality of the governing classes, state censorship, the pettifogging bureaucracy, the corrupt clergy—all the stifling ingredients of Russian life that created the climate for revolution—are alluded to in "The Coast of Utopia," but they are not fleshed out. The serfs, who made up a third of the empire, are conveyed here as a handful of ragged, spectral presences with dirty clothes and clean fingernails, and the violence meted out to them is only notionally acknowledged. (A serf is struck by Bakunin's mother and runs away crying. In real life, by contrast, Turgenev's grandmother hit a young serf and then, irritated by his outcry, smothered him to death.)

Sometime around 1995, according to his biographer Ira Nadel, Stoppard was entering the London Library with an armful of books when he bumped into the theatre critic Michael Billington. "Just returning my new play," Stoppard quipped. In "The Coast of Utopia," he has put his reading into his art, but not enough art into his reading. The pageant of philosophical fervor certainly suits his reflective temperament. "I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues," he said in a 1972 interview. "I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Forever." But here, ironically, with so many "isms" being bandied about—"Hegelianism," "Slavism," "populism," "obscurantism," "dialectical materialism"—the only "ism" missing is dynamism. Stoppard makes the ideological disputes cogent, but his glib narrative shorthand lends itself to synthesis, not to psychology. As a result, the ideas are given life, but the characters are not. The trilogy is like an unfinished portrait, the head rich in detail and the heart merely a wash of color. You don't know enough for the human drama to be compelling, and the plot begs more questions than it answers.

Nonetheless, no time in Stoppard's company is ever wasted. In giving us news of Herzen, who believed in both radical action and the limits of terror, he brings back into our dangerous world an articulate cautionary voice. "Life's bounty is in its flow," Herzen says. "Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too." Stoppard's discourse, it seems, is meant to free us from the spell of abstract nouns, which Herzen called "the syphilis of our revolutionary passions," and which rationalize the violent solution as a historical necessity. "There is no libretto," Herzen reminds us. "We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us." The trilogy's brilliant final monologue—Herzen's answer to the absolutes of his day and ours—alone is worth the price of admission:

Wall Street Journal

Tuesday September 10, 2002

Stoppard's Russian Evolution

by Paul Levy

London -- "The Coast of Utopia" comprises three three-hour plays on the intellectual precursors of the Russian Revolution. Is Tom Stoppard's new undertaking at the Royal National Theatre the product of ambition or vanity?   

Trevor Nunn's direction, and William Dudley's historically precise costumes, simple revolving sets, and imaginative video rear-projections of places and interiors add greatly to the coherence of the dramas. But having earlier seen one play on its own, I've no doubt that the Saturday marathon performances (on Sept. 14, Oct. 5, 12 and 19) are the ideal way to see the plays titled "Voyage," "Shipwreck" and "Salvage."   

It is not impossible to remember the Russian-novel-length cast of characters, but it is not so easy to keep in mind the nuances of their positions on the important issues -- the Westernizing and modernizing of Czarist Russia, the isolation, rootlessness and lack of a sense of belonging of the educated elite, the institution of serfdom, censorship and political repression, and reform vs. revolution. Seeing the pieces sequentially and at a minimum interval helps.   

After the failure of the constitutionalist, republican Decembrist movement in December 1825, the new Czar, Nicholas I, installed his thought police to contain and punish the enthusiasm of the tiny minority of educated Russians for the ideals of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Sir Tom's chief protagonist, Alexander Herzen, and Herzen's friend Nikolai Ogarev had vowed as adolescents to carry on the Decembrists' struggle, but they were jailed and then banished in the mid-1830s.   

"Voyage," however, opens in the summer of 1833 at Premukhino, the country estate of the family of the eventual anarchist Michael Bakunin ("the passion to destroy is also a creative passion"), and the audience realizes almost at once that this agreeable existence rests on a system of slavery where a person's wealth is not measured by the extent of the land he owns, but on how many "souls" (serfs) it sustains. You don't have to be Karl Marx (who turns up later, and plays only a minor role in the trilogy) to spot the contradiction.   

After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848 (in the course of the second play, whose title and controlling metaphor is "Shipwreck"), Herzen found himself unable to identify either with utopian socialism or with the destructive instincts of the revolutionary masses, and declared: "We do not proclaim a new goal, but we expose the old lies." He is Sir Tom's hero because, though he agrees with the novelist Turgenev (whose character, played beautifully by Guy Henry, makes you aware of the elegance of the lifestyle of the class denoted by the new word "intelligentsia") that history has no purpose, no single goal, and is ruled by chance, Herzen saw that even socialism was no solution. It, too, would generate contradictions that would require a revolution to resolve.   

Herzen's denial of universal solutions to humanity's problems, his view that each generation is different, and is an end in itself, not a means to a better future, is as congenial to post-Soviet Europeans as it is now to the American Left. But can you really make a drama from ideas, especially ideas as complex and subtle as these?   

Sir Tom truly gives it his best, but the exposition requires a certain number of monologues, and the texts of the trilogy contain an awful lot of dense pages of type. These could do with trimming, though the actors who deliver them -- Douglas Henshall as Michael Bakunin, Raymond Coulthard as the charismatic philosopher Stankevich, Will Keen as the lower-class literary critic Belinsky, Simon Day as Herzen's best friend Ogarev and, above all, Stephen Dillane as Herzen -- manage to be convincingly in character for the long stretches of time they are on stage.   

There is the suspicion, too, that the romantic subplots are window-dressing for the ideas. Chief of these is Ogarev's willing surrender of his wife, Natalie (Lucy Whybrow), to Herzen. Natalie, the best friend of Herzen's late wife takes over the exiled Herzen household, while her husband finds solace in Mary Sutherland, an engaging, gold-hearted London prostitute. Eve Best, who in several roles is the outstanding female performer in the trilogy, plays Mrs. Herzen -- also named Natalie -- and seizes the opportunity of her character's death from grief after the drowning of their young son to show her dramatic range.   

New York Times

Wednesday August 21, 2002

Great Minds Talk Volumes as Mortality Intervenes

by Ben Brantley

LONDON, Aug. 20 — Three little words open the floodgates: "Speaking of which. . . " This is the unexceptional phrase that so modestly begins "The Coast of Utopia," Tom Stoppard's engrossing and exasperating trilogy of plays at the Royal National Theater here about the intellectual forebears of the Russian Revolution.

During the more than nine hours required to perform all three of its parts, "The Coast of Utopia" takes the love of a good argument to spectacular extremes unknown in the theater since the heyday of George Bernard Shaw. The explosive, eloquent characters in the beautifully acted production of Mr. Stoppard's new work, which has been directed in bravura style by Trevor Nunn, are not making small talk.

No, the talk is as big as talk gets. For what are being discussed are, among other things, the fate of a nation, the philosophy of knowledge, the nature of history, the role of literature, the limits of love and the as yet undiscovered social system by which people can live in harmony and equality. There is also an abiding pained consciousness that language — and "Utopia" speaks in various foreign tongues — is desperately inadequate.

"Words just lead you on," says one character. "They arrange themselves every which way," filled with "promises they can't keep." It is fitting that among the trilogy's several stunning coups de théâtre the most memorable involves a deaf child surrounded by thundering silence.

The view from the 21st century confirms of course that the debates that dominate "Utopia" are not winnable. But any awareness of such futility does not stop the arguments' participants — who have resonant names like Bakunin, Turgenev, Marx, Belinsky and Herzen — from continuing to inspire, inflame, enrage, adore and bore one another. In this respect theatergoers will find it very easy to identify with them.

"The Coast of Utopia" has received courteous but very mixed reviews here, with "ambitious" looming admiringly and damningly. Yet on the single Saturday on which I saw all three plays (a time commitment of roughly 12 hours, allowing for bolted meals at the National's coffee bars), there were cancellation lines for every show. And as far as I could tell, no one failed to return after any of the intermissions, although I heard a few people grumbling about Stoppard's penchant for overwriting.

"The Coast of Utopia" deserves to be popular, though not for the reasons you might expect. It's not that the play's historical insights, which in truth aren't all that original, are good for you, like a high-fiber diet for the brain. Or that the Stoppardian epigrams (planted amid some frankly tedious speech making) sparkle.

What keeps audience members in their seats is Mr. Stoppard's passion and Mr. Nunn's gift for translating that heat into vibrantly human performances. They are provided by a superb cast led by the magnetic Stephen Dillane (a Tony winner for the revival of Mr. Stoppard's "Real Thing") as Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century radical theorist and editor, and Eve Best, an emotional powerhouse as Herzen's wife.

The pleasures of "Utopia," which is presented as a fairly straightforward narrative by Stoppard standards, are those of a fat novel that for all its long-windedness is a page turner.

From his "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967) to "The Invention of Love" (1997), Mr. Stoppard has consistently assumed the role of the playwright as super-student, luxuriating in the joys of research and in the opportunity to take every side of a question. In this sense he is very much like the ever-searching intellectuals of "Utopia" who have, above all, the courage of their contradictions.

The plays ("Voyage," "Shipwreck" and "Salvage") follow an elastic set of adversarial friends over 25 years, from their shared, largely privileged youth in Russia to exile in Western Europe. It is a period during which the survivors age severely (and most convincingly, by theatrical standards). Yet as their role models shift from Schelling to Kant to Hegel to Marx, they hold on to an adolescent combativeness and a precocious student's enthusiasm for new ideas.

That "Utopia" feels shaped by the same sensibility accounts for much of what is wonderful and annoying in the plays. Despite its leisurely length, there is a quality of breathlessness throughout the trilogy, like that of a man who has so much to say, he fears his tongue will never keep up with his mind.

There is also the sometimes suffocating feeling of Mr. Stoppard as a researcher who is so enamored of his material that he cannot bear to leave out a single good anecdote he has come across. "Voyage," the first part of the trilogy, is by the far the most artfully arranged and judiciously edited of the three. But even as the work, like its characters, grows more ragged with time, it never comes close to collapsing.

The energy isn't only cerebral. Like "The Invention of Love," a portrait of the poet A. E. Housman, "Utopia" aches with an awareness of the irreconcilable tensions between ideas and mortal substance.

The mind can never fully impose itself upon or transcend life itself, as Herzen comes to accept; real life is too wayward and people too varied for that. "Utopia" both laments and celebrates this condition.

The ways in which Mr. Nunn's production achieves this double tone are ravishing. With the help of David Hersey's virtuosic lighting, William Dudley — who designed the sets, costumes and videos — brilliantly keeps "Utopia" in heady visual flight as it segues from a Russian dacha to the ballrooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg to the streets of Paris in 1848 and finally to the staggering assortment of houses in England and on the Continent that Herzen called home.

The idea of a world in unstoppable motion is conveyed most literally by an immense turntable, which takes up most of the stage of the Olivier Theater and which revolves obligingly to change the audience's perspective on a scene. Behind, on a cycloramic screen, are projected beautifully wrought images of landscapes and architecture that meld ingeniously with the more solid elements of the set.

The impression is of flux and things ephemeral, which makes the of-the-moment vividness of the performances all the more poignant. The ensemble members, who number several dozen in some 70 roles, are remarkably accomplished portraitists. They bring to fruition the impulse that must have inspired Mr. Stoppard to create their characters, that sense of gleeful curiosity that can overtake a reader when one fine detail suddenly brings a historical figure to life.

It should be pointed out that these performances and Mr. Nunn's staging go a long way in providing the novelistic richness and empathy of "Utopia." Unlike much of Mr. Stoppard's work, "Utopia" lives far more compellingly on the stage than on the page.

To cite standouts is to some degree arbitrary, since nearly everyone is first rate. But I find I'm still especially haunted by Douglas Henshall, who makes inevitable the fatuous but ardent Bakunin's transformation from aristocrat into anarchist; Will Keen, who manages to be both tongue-tied and irresistibly verbose as the literary critic Belinksy; and Ms. Best, who brings a heartbreaking quality of longing and frustrated fire to three different roles that speak eloquently of what it meant to be a woman in those times, among those men.

There are also, at the show's center, two men who embody different approaches to the relativism that shapes "Utopia": the passionately engaged and arrogant Herzen and the elegantly detached and equally arrogant novelist Turgenev, impeccably embodied by Mr. Dillane and Guy Henry. Both have more than a little in common with Mr. Stoppard.

Consider the following dialogue: "To value what is relative to your circumstances, and let others value what's relative to theirs — you agree with me," Turgenev says, toward the trilogy's end, to Herzen, who answers him fiercely. "But I fought my way here with loss of blood," he says, "because it matters to me, and you're in my ditch, reposing with your hat over your face, because nothing matters to you very much."

The exchange is thoroughly typical of "Utopia." It is also throughly typical that the argument cannot be completed, both because one of Herzen's daughters has run into the room in a tantrum and because Turgenev's stomach hurts.

New York Times

Sunday August 4, 2002

A Stoppard Panorama of Russian Idealism

by Benedict Nightingale

TOM STOPPARD is the dramatist who debated the nature of God and good in his "Jumpers," brought Lenin and James Joyce onstage in "Travesties," and somehow made chaos theory, landscape gardening, Byron scholarship and Romanticism his joint subjects in "Arcadia"; but even he admits he has written nothing more ambitious than the trilogy opening at the Royal National Theater this weekend.

"The Coast of Utopia" lasts nine hours, if seen morning, afternoon and evening on a Saturday. It has a cast of 32, involves 70 characters, spans 35 years, and derives from five years of research into the dissidents, idealists and principled fugitives of 19th-century Russia.

Stephen Dillane takes the role. He won a Tony Award in 2000 for his performance as the mandarin dramatist in Mr. Stoppard's play "The Real Thing," a creation some thought semi-autobiographical. Now his task is to embody an aristocratic socialist, writer and exile in London who held some trademark Stoppard opinions. Herzen didn't say that his distinguishing mark was "an absolute lack of certainty about almost everything," as Mr. Stoppard once did, but he might have endorsed one of the dramatist's recent comments: "I'm a man of many different convictions, and they all co-exist."

"He despised Marx," Mr. Stoppard said in a recent conversation. "He didn't believe there was a set of axioms by which we could live at all times. He knew there would always be values which would conflict yet have validity: liberty versus equality, justice versus mercy. And he became my center in the second and third plays."

These two, "Shipwreck" and "Salvage," should provide fresh evidence of Mr. Stoppard's curiosity and love of philosophy. But the trilogy doesn't aspire to be the bravura intellectual exercise that, say, "Travesties" was. The first act of the opening play, "Voyage," which involves Bakunin and his family circle, is a belated attempt to satisfy what Mr. Stoppard said is every playwright's yearning to be Chekhovian. And since new Russian atrocities in 1861 devastated Herzen by denying him the chance to make peace with a reformist Czar, I would expect the trilogy to remind us that Mr. Stoppard, still sometimes decried as a chilly wit, is the emotionally generous author who recreated the unhappy A. E. Housman in "The Invention of Love."

But "The Coast of Utopia" is also the work of a writer who once said his aim was to reconcile ideas with laughter. Is it, well, funny? Since Herzen apparently said that his happiest memories of England were two brands of mustard and Worcestershire sauce, that doesn't seem unlikely.

"It's more naturalistic and less farcical than some of my work," Mr. Stoppard said. "But there's quite a lot of comedy there. I find it difficult to keep it out."   

Independent

Saturday August 3, 2002

A theatrical marathon to numb the most cultured bum

How my heart warms to the acting profession to learn that custard will be on constant supply

by David Lister

Theatre marathons can be fraught for both audiences and actors. I remember during the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby cycle some years ago, the actors mingled with the audience between plays (never a good idea, whatever directors might think). A man near me asked one actress who she was playing. "Mrs Nickleby'' snarled the angry performer, who had been on stage for much of the preceding three hours.

At the National today the actors will be rushing from costume and wig changes (Stephen Dillane virtually needs his own follicular agent, with a toupee in one play and extra hair added to his own beard in another) to wolfing down puddings backstage. And how my heart warms to the acting profession to learn from the National that custard will be on constant supply. There goes that ethereal image forever.

For audiences too, theatre marathons take on a distinctive character. Not least, they can be pick-up joints. Only the most bashful of theatregoers can avoid striking up a conversation with the person in the next seat after spending morning, afternoon and evening elbowing them, pushing past them and treading on their toes. Such is the foreplay of a National Theatre audience.

Variety

Saturday August 3, 2002

National Theater Stages Stoppard Marathon

LONDON (Reuters) - The National Theater on Saturday completed a nine-hour, three-part play in a marathon sell-out session, ending with three curtain calls and a standing ovation, a theater spokeswoman said.

With meal breaks, the world premiere of a new work by the Czech-born, British playwright Tom Stoppard lasted a punishing 12 hours.

The atmosphere at the end of the performance was "exhausted but elated," she added.

Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" is made up of three self-contained, but sequential plays which trace a group of 19th century Russian radicals caught in a struggle for political freedom.

The production, described by theater bosses as "unbelievably demanding," saw 30 actors playing 70 parts. Backroom staff fitted 416 costumes and 96 wigs.

Stoppard, whose other works include "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," said his latest work had snowballed from an original idea for a single play.

"I began to think I would need two plays," he told the Daily Telegraph. "Then I thought, let's go for broke."

Telegraph

Saturday August 3, 2002

National Theatre puts on a 10-hour marathon  (an excerpt)

by Nigel Reynolds

The theatre-going classes, critics, and a complement of 30 actors and almost 50 technicians will be holding their collective breath today in anticipation of one of the most ambitious theatrical projects in this country for a decade.

They form a sweeping sequential trilogy called The Coast of Utopia, on the recondite subject of a group of 19th century Russian radicals and thinkers, and the fight for political emancipation under Tsarist rule.

Only late tonight, after a punishing nine hours of drama, with meal breaks on top, will the world discover whether one of Britain's best loved playwrights, admired for making his audiences feel more intelligent on leaving a theatre than when they went into it, has created a masterpiece or an indulgence...

For the National, where rehearsals started in April and which has had to hire a score of extra backstage staff, the project has been "unbelievably demanding".

Directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, the theatre's boss, the 30 actors play a total of 70 roles. One, Jack James, must play 13 parts across the trilogy. Another, Tom Arnold, has 11 parts but understudies a further 25.

The costume department, which must fit 416 costumes, and the wig department, which will glue on 96 separate hairpieces, decided that they would be too exhausted to have a first night party tonight so they held it last night.

A large dressing room has been put aside to provide actors and technicians with drinks all day to prevent them becoming dehydrated.

The National describes today's marathon as "event theatre", comparable to mounting David Hare's trilogy a decade ago or the Royal Shakespeare Company's epic three-part staging of Nicholas Nickleby 30 years ago.

"We've been building up to this like a pregnancy," said a spokesman. "Everybody is nervous, excited and elated, and on the day we'll feel all that three times worse."

But it is Stoppard's reputation that is most on the line. His theme is the doomed quest for a Utopian society.

His characters, dug up from history, are the anarchists, free-thinkers and revolutionaries of mid-19th century Russia whose struggle for political freedom against Tsarist absolutism saw them imprisoned, exiled and become refugees in London and Paris.

Stoppard, whose previous plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties and Arcadia, said he was fired to the subject five years ago by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin's book of essays, Russian Thinkers, and also by a long-held wish to write in the manner of Chekhov...

With the action set in Moscow, St Petersburg, London and Paris, designer William Dudley has used ground-breaking 3-D video projection to cast moving images across the stage of smoke, rain, snow and a pine forest through which actors can appear.

Stoppard's theme about the impossibility of founding the perfect society continues by showing the discrepancy between his characters' messy, sometime hypocritical personal lives and their idealistic political statements.

Whatsonstage

Monday August 5, 2002

Stars Turn Out for Stoppard's Utopia Marathon

by Terri Paddock

A bevy of celebrities - including previous NT artistic directors Peter Hall and Richard Eyre; actors Olivia Williams, Neil Pearson, Imogen Stubbs (wife of Nunn) and Phyllida Law; feminist Germaine Greer; film director Mike Nicholls and his wife, American TV anchor Diane Sawyer; and a Broadway contingency led by Bernard Gersten, executive producer of the Lincoln Center (which has mounted the US premieres of numerous Stoppard plays) - joined national and international critics for a theatre marathon.

With all three plays - Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage - performed in succession, the marathon lasted twelve hours in total, starting at 11.00am and ending at 11.00pm, with some nine hours of performance broken up by intervals and meal breaks. At the end of Saturday's event, the exhausted audience enthusiastically applauded the Herculean efforts of the company as well as their own endurance.

Five years in the researching and writing, The Coast of Utopia is a sweeping epic about Russian intelligentsia, covering three decades of philosophy, politics, revolution and romance. The 30-strong company - which includes Stephen Dillane, Douglas Henshall, Guy Henry, John Carlisle, Raymond Coulthard, Eve Best, Charlotte Emerson and Anna Maxwell-Martin - perform in all three plays, portraying an assortment of 70 characters between them.

Author Stoppard has had several successful premieres at the National, including Arcadia, On the Razzle and, most recently, The Invention of Love. Amongst his other plays are Indian Ink, Jumpers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Travesties. Stoppard has also scored big with his screenwriting on films such as Enigma, Shakespeare in Love and The Russia House.