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The Daily Telegraph - review
Excellent in parts but less than Utopian
(Filed: 05/08/2002)
Tom Stoppard's epic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, is one of the most ambitious productions the National Theatre has ever staged. Charles Spencer gives his verdict
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.
He focuses on the Russian intellectuals who were appalled by the tyranny, injustice and lack of culture of their native country ("the Caliban of Europe"), and explores the ways they tried either to come to terms with it or to change it - through philosophy, though revolutionary politics and through art, particularly literature. These were the men who sowed the seeds of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
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 Daily Telegraph - Opinion
The police used to carry gazetteers rather than guns
By Paul Goodman
(Filed: 05/08/2002)
If a single new play by Tom Stoppard is a major theatrical event, how does one describe three at once? Last Saturday saw the press night of Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, which together make up his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, now playing at the National Theatre: I was there from 11am until 11pm to see all of them.
They begin with an old man remembering the storming of the Bastille and they end with a middle-aged man watching summer lightning, itself a symbol both of the transitory nature of human happiness and the storm of the Russian Revolution to come.
In between, Stoppard writes about radical politics, philosophy, literature, art, exile, raising children and love, while making lots of jokes, as one would expect.
He might, being Stoppard, regard any attempt to draw a moral for modern Britain from all this as mere vulgarity. But I think there is one, and it is important. For as well as being about all these things, The Coast of Utopia is about freedom.
"What freedom means is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his," Stoppard writes. But the freedom he trusts is not the mere liberty to act, or the right balance between freedom and order. It is freedom of a particular place, England, and its way of life.
Our hero is Alexander Herzen, a Russian socialist, whose life, like the ship that sails in the triple play's title, is a study in the hope, mutability and heartbreak of human affairs. Herzen is raised in Tsar-governed, superstition-riddled Imperial Russia, "the Caliban of Europe", which has missed out not just on the Enlightenment but on the Renaissance, and where even the everyday tools associated with Russia - the samovar, the bast shoe, the horse bridle - were not actually invented there.
A country that produces no original artifacts produces no original ideas either. All thought is suspect, and the only plays shown in theatres have titles like "The Hand of the Almighty saved the Fatherland". With his childhood friend, Ogarev, the young Herzen clambers to the top of Sparrow hills and swears to avenge the Decembrists, whose attempted coup sought radical reform in Russia.
Herzen speeds from Russia and the censor to France just in time for the 1848 revolution. But he has already dismissed the romantic philosophy of Hegel, in which history is a force on the march: "People don't storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History succeeds because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille."
He is suspicious of revolutionary hopes of universal bliss. The 1848 uprisings fail. The French elect Louis Napoleon as president, who later declares himself emperor.
But Russia, it turns out, has made one original contribution to civilisation. A new word has appeared in the dictionary, minted to describe a new Russian phenomenon: "intelligentsia the intellectual opposition considered as a social force".
Herzen is part of this, as is the anarchist Bakunin, the novelist Turgenev, and Karl Marx, who turns Hegel's philosophy on its head by ascribing the progress of history not to the clash of ideas but of classes. Stoppard's Marx is a bilious pedagogue, who can already "see the Neva lit by flames and running red, the coconut palms hung with corpses all along the shining strand from Kronstadt to the Nevsky Prospekt".
Bakunin is nearly as bad - a sponging, self-centred, ex-army officer taking flight from his family responsibilities, buoyed up through life by the brother-worship of his sisters, who has "made [himself] a European reputation by a kind of revolutionary word-music from which it is impossible to extract an ounce of meaning, let alone a political idea, let alone a course of action".
If Marx and Bakunin are Stoppard's anti-heroes, then Turgenev, like Herzen himself, is one of his heroes. Like Stoppard, Turgenev stands accused of irony and detachment. "People complain about me having no attitude in my stories Whose fault is it that this peasant is a useless drunkard, his or ours?"
Herzen leaves Paris for Nice, where his unfaithful wife, Natalie, dies after his son, Kolya, drowns when a Marseilles steamer goes down. Thence to London, where a lunatic galere of revolutionaries is gathered, consumed by feuds and vendettas.
His magazine, The Bell, calls for reform but not revolt, to the fury of a new generation of revolutionaries who want not literature and philosophy but "the black bread of facts and figures".
But Herzen has already seen "enough wet blood in the gutters to last me". The coming Russian Revolution is "this Moloch who promises that everything will be beautiful after we're dead the end we work for must be closer, the labourer's wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness".
More than 100 years later, Marx's dogmas are discredited, globalisation holds sway and most of us are wary of pitching our boats towards the storms and rocks that guard the coast of Utopia. But it seems to me that, sceptic that he is, Stoppard has a Utopia all of his own - Britain, or rather not Britain but England, the England of freedom in which, idealised in these plays, Herzen finds asylum.
In Stoppard's England of bad restaurants and helpful policemen and free speech, "there's no system to anything everything's just left to grow tangled together", like the shrubbery in Kew Gardens which Louis Blanc describes in Salvage. Rooted institutions and personal freedom go together. Can one survive without the other?
It would be impertinent to put the question into Stoppard's mouth, but it is worth asking all the same. New Labour has seen off the old Left, but doesn't the Prime Minister believe in the "dustbin of history" as fervently as any Marxist?
If the old cry was: "All power to the Soviets", the new cry is "All power to Downing Street", as the old roots are grubbed up by the new intelligentsia. The hereditary peers have been purged from the Lords and the guillotines are coming down in the Commons. Scotland has its own parliament, for better or worse.
Northern Ireland is part-governed by gangster-terrorists. Louis XVI was taken by the mob to Paris and executed; the Queen was taken by the Prime Minister to the Dome and forced to sing Auld Lang Syne. It is not quite such a grisly fate, but it rankles. And scrapping the pound, like a federal Europe, is, remember, "inevitable".
But "freed" from our roots, we are everywhere in chains. In Stoppard's Utopian England, the police "are for people who are lost. They're issued with maps and gazetteers. Often you see them two together so that they can consult about the shortest route."
In Tony Blair's Britain, the police are more likely to carry guns than gazetteers, and to arrive in armed gangs when you don't want them than be seen in pairs whether you want them or not.
There are more health and safety provisions and child safety orders and EU directives but fewer independent charities and places to walk safely. There are more rules and regulations, but less civility. There is more law, but less order and liberty.
Britain is less a free country than it was - and Stoppard's trilogy strikes me as something of a paean to freedom. The Coast of Utopia is a tract for the times.
Paul Goodman is Conservative MP for Wycombe

The Times
Long view of Stoppard's triple vision
By Benedict Nightingale
Theatre: The Coast of Utopia
Olivier, National Theatre

THERE are no dramatists for whom I'd rather risk deep-vein thrombosis than Tom Stoppard, but his nine-hour flight through mid-19th-century Russian history isn't the easiest ride. Yes, The Coast of Utopia is refreshingly ambitious in its sweep. Yes, it's packed with reflections on idealism and political change that still have clout today. But the trilogy has its longueurs, its dips of energy, its relentlessly protracted arguments - and only sporadically the fun that is Stoppard's trademark.
The National suggests that any one of the evening's three plays may be seen in isolation. That's a dubious claim, since the pioneering socialist Alexander Herzen has a major role in the opener, Voyage, and goes on to dominate Shipwreck and Salvage. Miss part of Trevor Nunn's production, and you'll miss a large part of its main character. But if you want to sample a single play, I think the finest is Voyage, which starts in a genially Chekhovian style, introduces key characters, and gives you a sense of the intellectual hurly-burly of an age in which dissident aristocrats or "repentant gentry" were leading the opposition to a serf-owning society and a monstrously oppressive Tsar.
No fewer than four sisters are bubbling about grouchy, conventional old Alexander Bakunin's mansion, the sweetest of whom yearningly cries "Moscow!" at one point, but it's their brother, Douglas Henshall's nicely observed Michael, who is the centre of everyone's attention, especially his own. Stoppard charts his progress from a dizzy belief that "the life of the spirit is the only real life" to a conviction that this spirit has social obligations and eventually to a murderous radicalism, never letting you overlook the man's awful self-absorption.
He's compared with Guy Henry's Turgenev, whose dandified view is that "the only thing that will save Russia is European culture transmitted by people like us", and Will Keen's Belinsky, a critic whose roots are more proletarian than the others. Stuttering and hiccuping out his outrage - terrific acting here - he believes that "Russian literature alone can redeem our honour" and has the pluck to return from exile to proclaim this in the lion's mouth. But with the arrival of Stephen Dillane's Herzen, the trilogy finds its most articulate voice and, in so far as Stoppard deals in heroism, its hero.
Voyage largely involves the evolution of Russian dissidents from navel-gazing to commitment, Shipwreck the question of how change is to be achieved: from above or below or both? But before long the evening becomes a biopic involving Herzen, his exile to Paris, Nice and London, his post-1848 ennui, his wife and son's deaths, his launching of a samizdat magazine, his affair with his best friend's wife, his rejection by the young revolutionaries he helped to create.
All this comes with much speechifying - Herzen would be playing the earnest raisonneur in the middle of Armageddon - whose content is, however, hard to sum up. Let's say that, unlike Paul Ritter's dogmatic Marx but maybe like Stoppard himself, he believes that a mix of chance and choice determines social change. There are no rigid entities called "history", "the future" or "Utopia": just a duty to push the world forward as peacefully as possible, hoping it doesn't terminally implode as it goes.
Does Dillane's dry, inward performance give full life to this famously charismatic man? I wonder. I also wonder if Stoppard's references to, say, the Decembrists, Hegelian philosophy and Turgenev's anti-hero Bazarov will puzzle the uninitiated. At times I felt that too much research was being conscientiously crammed into the trilogy. And though the hifalutin, touchingly innocent talk about love has its place in a play about Utopianism, it leads to some loose, meandering episodes, as do the thematically similar but distracting ruminations on education. Yet this allows Eve Best to give the last of three super performances as the Herzens' pernickety governess. There's strong acting, too, from John Carlisle, Simon Day, Sam Troughton as a comically posturing Slavophile, and others.
Nunn brings his usual skill to a thickly peopled stage circled by lavish film-projections of Paris streets, Nice shoreline, Russian countryside, whatever; but he could have trimmed and tightened a bit. Still, when Dillane's Herzen ends up denouncing Utopian theory as a "Moloch that promises everything will be beautiful after we are dead", and acknowledges "the summer lightning of personal happiness", Stoppard's piece does sing.

The Guardian
The Coast of Utopia
4 stars National Theatre, London
Michael Billington
Monday August 5, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4475615,00.html
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.
Each play in the trilogy, dealing with 19th-century Russian revolutionaries, has its own style. Voyage, the first and best, focuses on the anarchic Bakunin and the critic Belinsky and seems like a tonic combination of Gorki and Chekhov. Shipwreck, the least satisfying, deals with the impact of the 1848 French revolution on a group of nomadic intellectuals, including the libertarian socialist Alexander Herzen and the westernised Turgenev. Salvage, the final play, is set mainly in London between 1853 and 1865 and offers a Dickensian portrait of the fractious emigre community.
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.

The Independent
Stoppard's magnificent spectacle - just the five hours too long
By Paul Taylor
05 August 2002
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=321679
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 premiere 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.
The epic production takes more than nine hours to guide us through three decades (1833 to 1868) in the fraught experience of Russia's intelligentsia, the emergent class of intellectuals struggling against the autocracy, censorship, slavery and benighted backwardness of the rule of Tsar Nicholas I.
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 premiered after the collapse of communism, The Coast of Utopia could just as easily have been written before that.
The publicity says the three parts are self-contained. I'd say it's a choice between all or none. Though if you opt for the former, you may think the piece takes nine hours to say what could have been better communicated in four.