Tom Stoppard: the coast of utopia a trilogy of plays

(Editor's Note: Peter Kemp is a well-known British literary critic who is the Fiction Editor for the Sunday Times newspaper. He lectures and writes on modern fiction, and frequently takes part in literary discussions on BBC programmes and elsewhere. He has been an adviser on. the selection of novels for our Contemporary British Literature project. In response to one of the letters in our new 'Letters Section' we decided to publish an article on contemporary drama. This review of Tom Stoppard's trilogy of plays was first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 2002, and we are grateful for their permission to reprint it. Towards the end of the article are some paragraphs discussing the 2002 production which closed six years ago. However, the editors decided that the comments were sufficiently interesting for our readers and should therefore not be cut from Peter Kemp's original review.)