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Stoppard's magnificent spectacle - just the five hours too long

Paul Taylor
Monday 05 August 2002 00:00 BST
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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 première 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 premièred 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.

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