The Coast of Utopia (review)

In an interview with Mel Gussow several years ago, Tom Stoppard remarked that, "I am a playwright who is interested in ideas and is forced to invent characters to express those ideas." This is certainly the case in his latest work, The Coast of Utopia, staged by the Royal National Theatre and regarded as one of the most ambitious and eagerly anticipated events of London's 2002 summer theatre season. Consisting of three sequential plays (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), The Coast of Utopia is a dramatic biography of a group of nineteenth-century Russian radicals and focuses on their efforts to create political change in a country ravaged by poverty, injustice, and centuries of reactionary Tsarist rule. It is an extravaganza: thirty actors playing seventy parts, 416 costumes, and (according [Begin Page 350] to the National Theatre's publicity department) ninety-six wigs. The three plays (each slightly over three hours long) are challenging and provocative, yet less than wholly satisfying. In many ways, the trilogy leaves the audience wanting less.

Stoppard's plays borrow heavily from two sources: Isaiah Berlin's 1978 collection of essays, Russian Thinkers, and British scholar E. H. Carr's engaging historical text, The Romantic Exiles, originally published in 1933. Like Berlin, Stoppard focuses on the lives of, among others, the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (the so-called "father of anarchism" and founder of Russian populism), the socialist philosopher and editor Alexander Herzen, the literary critic Vissarion Belins, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev. It is Herzen who is clearly at the center of the trilogy and serves as the playwright's primary spokesperson and philosophical muse.

Voyage begins on the Bakunin country estate in 1833. Lingering in the shadows are the long-suffering serfs, serving as visual evidence of the privileges of the aristocracy that bred many of Russia's nineteenth-century student radicals. The young revolutionaries gather in opulent surroundings, plotting, theorizing, and competing among themselves to explain why Russia is so backward. This is a recurring theme throughout the trilogy. As the philosopher Chaadaev exclaims in frustration, "How did we come to be the Caliban of Europe?" (Voyage, II). Reflecting on the difference between the Western European and Russian calendars, Turgenev remarks, "I always think—that our situation in Russia isn't hopeless while we've got twelve days to catch up" (Voyage, I). And from Belinsky: "we're nothing to the world except an object lesson in what to avoid" (Voyage, II). A host of political ideas ferment and bubble in Voyage as each character ponders the gap between personal commitment and idealism. They talk the talk, but are unable (as yet) to walk the walk.

Stoppard deliberately manipulates time in Voyage (a technique he used successfully in The Real Thing, Arcadia, and India Ink) by presenting a linear chronology in the first act and then moving back in time in the second to fill in historical gaps and paint a fuller dramatic perspective. Bakunin's philosophical and political ideas emerge from a family dedicated to educational and philosophical pursuits (privileges granted to Mikhail's sisters as well) that are only possible through the largesse of his wealthy father. Stoppard has previously expressed an interest in writing a Chekovian drama. Besting Chekhov, he gives us four sisters instead of three and (surprise!) they all want to go to Moscow.

Herzen fully assumes the central role of Stoppard's trilogy in Shipwreck. Probably the best of the three plays, Shipwreck focuses on the events before, during, and immediately after the 1848 European uprisings.Herzen is in exile, but unlike most of his colleagues, has been able to get his money out of Russia, allowing him to live comfortably and give generously to his less fortunate revolutionary colleagues. Shipwreck shifts locales from Russia to Germany to France—and, like Voyage, uses flashback techniques to give a clearer picture of the major characters and their relationships.

What makes Shipwreck particularly wrenching is...