Theater: 'The Coast of Utopia'

LONDON, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Theater on a grand scale implicitly rebukes those who would treat drama as a diversion. In very different ways, Goethe's "Faust," Ibsen's "Peer Gynt," Wagner's operas, and the daylong mystery cycles still occasionally revived in York and Chester all lay claim to a reach and seriousness too great for the usual evening-show-with-dinner-to-follow routine.

"The Coast of Utopia," Tom Stoppard's new trilogy about the personal and private struggles of Russia's mid-19th century intelligentsia belongs to this same genre of event theater.

London's National Theatre has added to the sense of occasion by opening the trilogy at the beginning of August, when London theater is generally quiet and the media turns its attention to the carnival mish-mash of Edinburgh's overlapping arts festivals. As several critics have commented, "The Coast of Utopia" bears an unhappy resemblance to the bourgeois radicals it chronicles: relentless and sometimes magnificent in its ambition, rather less successful in its concrete achievements. Yet it is also rich and fascinating, the work of a writer in his fifth decade of productivity extending and risking his writing at a time when most of his generation of British playwrights seem sadly diminished.

It raises the question why a writer so distant from the grand seriousness and self-assertion of this kind of theater -- a writer whose plays are often scintillating chamber pieces -- should decide to write an epic.

The marketing material for "The Coast of Utopia" claims that it consists of "three sequential self-contained plays" but one senses that this formulation derives more from a fear of intimidating the audience than the nature of the plays themselves.

"The Coast of Utopia" is really a single 9-hour play, with an architecture that needs to be taken as a whole, sweeping from youth to age and from hope through catastrophe to renewed but chastened effort. With the help of Trevor Nunn's dynamic and fleet-footed direction and William Dudley's cinematic design work, projecting moving video backdrops onto a curving backdrop, it cuts a swathe through European history, following a cast of more than 90 speaking characters from 1833 to 1865.

The first play, "Voyage," centers on the impetuous young radical Michael Bakunin (Douglas Henshall), his rebellion powered by a terrifying, blind egotism and the heady philosophical romanticism of German idealism. While he enthuses about the philosophies of Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, each suggesting a different view about the nature of self and reality, Bakunin's selfishness in the mundane world wrecks the marital prospects of his doting sisters and makes him a continual burden on his friends.

The second play, "Shipwreck," continues to follow Bakunin but turns its attention more to the liberal socialist Alexander Herzen (a performance of intelligence and conviction from Stephen Dillane), Stoppard's hero, who had been exiled by the autocratic czar during the action of most of the first play. The title alludes to a double disaster. The disappointed dream of the 1848 revolution in Paris, in which both Bakunin and Herzen participated, occupies the first half of the play.

The second half turns to Herzen's personal calamity: the near-collapse of his marriage and then, through accident and illness, the precipitous loss of most of his family.

"Salvage," the third play, follows Herzen to London, where his money and sardonic intelligence make him a focus of the community of European radicals -- including Karl Marx, the French socialist Louis Blanc and the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini -- taking refuge there. As he campaigns at a distance for the emancipation of the serfs, a new generation of nihilists and militant socialists, deriding the efforts of "repentant gentry" like Herzen, foreshadow the Russian Revolution to come.

At the heart of his enterprise lies Stoppard's wish to celebrate and explore a more benign kind of political radicalism in Russia that offers a tantalizing alternative to the revolution of 1917. With the delusions of communist utopianism in mind, "The Coast of Utopia" repeatedly contrasts idealism, in politics, philosophy and love, with messy reality.

This is epic, historical theater written by someone who does not believe that history has logic or form. Chance regularly intrudes into the narrative. At one point Stoppard memorably personifies history as a huge ginger cat, playing with us and killing us at its whim. The scenes have an overlapping, chaotic quality of that owes an obvious debt to Chekhov. As ever, Stoppard juxtaposes big ideas with small, significant things -- a dropped penknife that becomes a mistaken love-token or the tuberculosis bacillus that foreshortens several characters' lives -- to suggest the sheer vanity of grand schemes.

Moment to moment, there is no question of Stoppard's assured skill. His dialogue is as witty and pithy as ever, his sense of comic absurdity undimmed. The sheer range of information he is able to bring to the stage is remarkable, guiding the audience with insouciant ease through the fashions of German philosophy, the fraught world of Russian literature and political publishing and the machinations of 19th century European political history.

Alongside Bakunin and Herzen, he creates two other rich and attractive main characters -- the nervous and furious critic Vissarion Belinksy (Will Keen on superbly splenetic form), and the wry, non-committal writer Ivan Turgenev (a gentlemanly Guy Henry) -- as well as scores of secondary ones.

The work's vices are born of passion. It is often as if Stoppard has fallen in love with his material and his characters to the point that he seems unwilling to leave anything out. Do we really need to know so much about Bakunin's family life, once the central point about his selfishness has been made? How interesting is Natalie Herzen's adulterous love affair with the narcissistic German poet George Herwegh? Stoppard binds together his narrative by repeating scenes, situations and symbols and by experimenting further, as in "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love," with looping time schemes, but there are times when "The Coast of Utopia" sprawls.

The trilogy's most serious failing stems from Stoppard's hatred of communism. Stoppard's Turgenev extols the virtues of refusing to take sides, but it is not advice Stoppard takes himself.

Marx -- like the Slavophile thinker who appears briefly at the beginning of the second play -- is reduced to a caricature. Herzen, on the other hand, is too clearly the author's mouthpiece, given speech after speech attacking utopian delusion. Worse still, though it does convey what life was like for its middle-class heroes living under a repressive regime, "The Coast of Utopia" barely bothers to represent the sufferings of the serfs or the working classes who give the revolutionaries their political urgency.

This may be true to the narrow experiences of the revolutionaries themselves, but it makes the case for gradual, peaceful change too easy and the demands of the new generation of revolutionaries seem needlessly strident. When communism and grand political dreaming are anyway generally discredited, Stoppard's insistence on attacking them has the air of knocking on an open door.

In the end, "The Coast of Utopia" is successful almost in spite of its ideas. And although grossly overlong, the trilogy's force derives from its epic sweep.

For Stoppard's real theme is not so much political or intellectual as emotional and personal. In the third, most coherent, part of the trilogy, we see Herzen, a man who has lived through long years of happiness and suffering, first giving into apathy and then being spurred on to fight again. At its best, "The Coast of Utopia" extols a virtue that only epic theatre can truly show: persistence.

By the end -- in one of his few ideologically surprising moments -- Stoppard comes to admire even the unwearying, irrepressible energy of Bakunin's lunatic enthusiasms. Survival and tenacity are an older writer's themes. In his curious, uneven, sometimes brilliant epic, Stoppard has given them moving expression.