Tom Stoppard: the coast of utopia a trilogy of plays

'There aren't actually many words in a play', Tom Stoppard has remarked. This isn't, it has to be said, the impression given by The Coast of Utopia, his nine-hour trilogy about mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries. Unstoppably verbal, its characters discuss, debate, argue, speechify and lecture. When not volubly acquainting one another with their current intellectual and political positions, they read, write and translate. Library-loads of books are toted around the stage as people pore over Pushkin, peruse Hegel, Kant and Schelling, enthuse about Fichte or Saint-Simon. At a Moscow costume ball in 1843, young Ivan Turgenev presents a volume of his verses to the critic, Vissarion Belinsky. In March 1848, Karl Marx advances across the Place de la Concorde with a copy of his just-published Communist Manifesto. Magazines and periodicals - the Telescope, the Moscow Observer, the Contemporary, the Bell - flutter in and out of scenes. Printing presses trundle on. Dictionaries are sought after. As the main protagonists - Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin and Turgenev - are pushed or drift into exile and expatriation, letters and telegrams play increasingly major roles in the drama.

Besides its superabundance of talk and texts, The Coast of Utopia spills over with scenes and characters. Extending in time from 1833 to 1868, it swerves around from Russian country estates to Moscow and St Petersburg, a German spa, salons, barricades and artists' quarters in Paris, a prison in Saxony, the Promenade at Nice, Parliament Hill, villas in Richmond and Finchley, the Isle of Wight, and cafe-bars and a chateau in Switzerland. Through these far-flung locales stream more than ninety at times voluminously informative characters. Having spent years immersing himself in research material for this epic project, Stoppard seems unwilling to leave anything he has garnered behind in his notebooks. A plethora of political and intellectual history is unloaded into these three plays which often zigzag around to accommodate his findings.

The Coast of Utopia most obviously imposes some order on its vast spread of people, places and philosophies by its division into three emblematically-entitled plays: Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage. The first, set entirely in Russia, dramatizes the origins and emergence of radical opposition to Tsarist autocracy. The second, most consistently located in Paris, focuses on the calamitous routing of libertarian uprising by the forces of reaction in 1848. The third, wandering around emigre haunts in London and Geneva, looks at efforts to retrieve something of benefit from that momentous wreckage of radical hopes. Prelude, catastrophe and aftermath, the three plays respectively concentrate on a totalitarian society, a nation seen as a beacon of progress but where egalitarian aspirations are brutally quenched, and two countries offering tolerant, if tainted, asylum. Through the trilogy runs a trajectory that takes a generation of Russian intelligentsia from soulful ardours about Romanticism and Idealist philosophy to confrontations with Nihilism and dialectical materialist advocacies of violent revolution. Along with the tripartite political structure goes a personal one. In Voyage, the main characters are young people, effervescent with ideals and vitality, whose matrimonial, social and career prospects are a cause of often angry concern to their parents. Ship-wreck portrays the protagonists as now parents themselves and shaken by betrayals and disillusionments in their private lives as well as their political struggles. A sense of elderliness pervades Salvage (when it ends, its hero, Herzen, is only two years away from his death, and has been contemptuously elbowed aside by callowly ferocious advocates of a blood-bath revolution as the cure for Russia's ills).

■ Not unlike the revolutionary scenarios it inspects, The Coast of Utopia must have looked appealingly neat when first sketched out but proves to be far messier in implementation. Besides the constant thwarting of narrative momentum by Stoppard's propensity for detour, there's a sprawling willingness to repeat effects, situations, ideas and jokes. Early established as a parasitic charlatan ("1 could study Idealism in Berlin for three years for the price of a couple of house serfs"), Bakunin is put through the same routine on numerous occasions throughout the trilogy: returning after an absence, he harangues his comrades with details of his latest absurd revolutionary posture, then, promising this will be for "the last time", cadges money off them. Similarly, the notion that devisers of utopian societies can be embroiled in very un-utopian domestic circumstances gets recycled very frequently. Most damaging to the trilogy's purposes is Stoppard’s labouring of his main point. The ambition of The Coast of Utopia is to identify and celebrate an alternative Russian radical opposition which might have succeeded where Communism ruinously failed. Four figures are spotlit in this context. Herzen - appropriately the heart of all three plays - stands for a humanistic gradualism, piecemeal social reform undertaken with wary practicality, accurate perception and healthy scepticism about universal blueprints for Utopia. Turgenev personifies a civilized but quietist and eventually pessimistic Liberalism. Bakunin represents grossly muddled and leechlike anarchism. Marx, allied with the Nihilists, who are presented as proto-Bolsheviks, megalomaniacally rants out his dogmas about "the last turn of the great wheel of progress beneath which generations of toiling masses perished for the ultimate victory". . , . . m ji, . !

Lambasting Marx and lampooning Bakunin, The Coast of Utopia acclaims Herzen (made to sound rather Stoppard-like when Turgenev says he could be "Minister of Paradox with special responsibility for irony"). But even those who share Stoppard’s esteem for Herzen's position with its congenial sanity and wry intelligence are likely to feel restive after nine hours' reiteration of its virtues and revoicing of arguments against its opponents. Throughout this trilogy that displays the nightmare of police-state censorship, you find yourself wishing that the author had been willing to wield the blue pencil rather more extensively.

Why Stoppard hasn't done this and has permitted what could have been a grippingly taut and packed three-act drama to swell into a slacker, repetitive trilogy is a question whose answer might be traced back to his earlier work, of whose preoccupations and procedures it seems a massive summation. ,

Stoppard has always been theatre's great juxtaposer. What strikes sparks in his imagination is the flamboyant bringing together of unlikely associates. Exhibiting this from the start, his first success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), began as a verse-spoof called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear (zanily spatchcocking two of Shakespeare's tragedies, it had the emissaries from Elsinore crossing the mad monarch's path when they disembarked at Dover). Stoppard's subsequent re-working more subtly counterpoints Hamlet with a backstage version of it. Since then, he has spent almost four decades dramatically bouncing apparent antitheses off one another. The Real Inspector Hound (1968) teasingly twitched away the barrier between play and audience so that two theatre critics end up as centre-stage corpses amid the stock characters of an Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery they are watching. With Jumpers <\9Т1\ Stoppard exuberantly developed what has turned out to be one of Iris drama's most enduring, if not always most endearing, features: the boisterous interaction of the silly and the cerebral. Acrobats jostled academics; musical comedy did a duet with moral philosophy. In what now seems a cartoonish prefiguring of The Coast of Utopia, Travesties (1974) continued this enthralment with contrasts:

in the Zurich of 1918 where Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara, the father of Dada, were improbable со-refugees, politics and aesthetics, surrealism and Soviet Realism crazily coincide.

Stoppard's penchant for opening up dual perspectives is matched by his enthusiasm for filling his plays with alter egos, doubles and twins. It is constantly perceptible in his preferred tone, irony, and his favourite comic device, the pun. Stressing that he likes to remain in two minds about the ideas and ideologies his plays make game with, he has said that the lines in English drama which he finds most sympathetic are from Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist; "I'm a man of no convictions. At least, I think I am." In interviews, he voices his own version of this: "What I think of as being my distinguishing mark is an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything."

As The Coast of Utopia reminds you, one thing Stoppard has no lack of certainty about is the evil of totalitarianism's desire to impose tunnel-vision tyranny. Driven from his homeland, Czechoslovakia, when a child by one instance of it, Nazism, he found another manifestation of it, Soviet Communism, oppressing the country when he went back there in the 1970s. The impact of this on his writing was marked. Where his earlier plays, with their insouciant veerings between flippancy and erudition, risked seeming centre-less jeux d'esprit, his plays of the late 1970s and early 1980s were unexpectedly heavy-handed and almost hectoringly didactic. Squaring the Circle (1984), his television dramatization of the history of the Polish trade union, Solidarity, didn't only go in for emphatically black and white visual juxtapositions (funereal figures in a white-tiled urinal, black-suited visitors in a blanched hospital room). Its contrasts between the Soviet Union and the USA were likewise so glaringly stark as to bring the play perilously close to CIA agit-prop. Though Stoppard persisted with his unlikely-combination technique - ethics and soccer teamed up in Professional Foul (1977), orchestral performance and maltreatment of political dissidents counterpointed in his musical venture, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) - his former verve at provoking thought by means of contrast seemed clogged by the over-assertiveness of Iris anti-communist message.

Significantly, it was when he freed himself from East/West politics that his talent surged up to its most striking accomplishments. Moving between the early-nineteenth and the late-twenticth centuries, Arcadia (1993), his dazzling comic interplay of romantic and classic sensibilities, art and science, Newtonian physics and Chaos Theory, showed a new keenness on comparing and contrasting different epochs. So did Indian Ink (1995), his retrospect on to the Raj, and The Invention of Love (1997), his double-vision scrutiny of High Victorianism and its 1890s decadence.

Chronicling three eras of European intellectual history, and interweaving idealism and materialism, liberty and despotism, private and public life, aesthete detachment and political involvement, things unsaid and manifestos proclaimed, chattering vitality and choking deaths from ТВ, The Coast of Utopia re-introduces animus against Communism into Stoppard's most ambitious deployment of themes and skills he has been honing over almost forty years. Again, it tilts him towards over-insistence: the repetition of indictments that scarcely warrant such vehement emphasis, given Communism's now fairly comprehensively discredited status.

To counterbalance this polemical pressure and ensure that the trilogy's stirring, affecting and entertaining elements aren't smothered by it, Trevor Nunn's superb production teems with inventive energy. Inspired use of the Olivier's revolve (perfect for the oscillations Stoppard favours) along with spectacular video back-projection and richly atmospheric music from Steven Edis makes scene after scene memorable. The Bakunins' country estate where the first half of Voyage occurs is a shimmering idyll of silver birches around a neoclassical facade. Balalaika chords throb as young women palpitate over Eugene Onegin and George Sand's romances. The premonitory allusions to Turgenev's writings and Chekhov's plays that rustle through Stoppard's text as four sisters in this nest of gentlefolk pine for Moscow are elegantly pointed up by the production's style. Voyage’s second half, a metropolitan counterpart to what was happening in the country, opens with a beautifully gauged scene at the skating rink in Moscow's zoo: as young couples glide around on ice, cages ominously flicker in and out of view.

First-rate performances lift things further. Stephen Dillan's Herzen, every line alive with cogent humanity, is a masterly display of stamina and subtlety. Will Keen's driven Belinsky and Guy Henry's dandified Turgenev partner him excellently in the two-person dialogues that are this panoramic trilogy's most involving feature. Inhabiting a troika of roles, John Carlisle brings veteran virtuosity to his depiction of Bakunin's benignly despotic father, a nervous Russian Consul in Nice and a courtly moribund Polish exile. Eve Best finely differentiates a tubercular girl hopelessly in love, Herzen’s unstable wife and a martinet German governess. Everywhere, production and cast rise to the opportunities and challenges of this huge, flawed, meandering and occasionally magnificent trilogy. . ; : T : < i Tv: