Review of Reviews
At home with men of Russia's history
Alastair Macaulay is in thrall to the poetic beauty of Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia
(NationaL Theatre)
How do we combine the life of the mind with the day-to-day fabric of everyday life? Tom Stoppard's new trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, is about the first generation of the intelligentsia in Russia the generation of mid-19th-century Russian thinkers for whom the word "intelligentsia" was coined, Bakunin, Belinsky, Turgenev, and (above all) Herzen, men so central to Isaiah Berlin's book, Russian Thinkers. The question that was much asked then, about the future of Russia, was: What is to be done?
Stoppard joins that to simpler question: what is going on? Ideas: meet reality. And so what is extraordinary about The Coast of Utopia is the degree to which each play isn't about their ideas, isn't about their writing, isn't about the climate of Tsarist censorship against which these writers struggled, though all those things are certainly there in good measure.
You can't miss how much each play is about these men's everyday life: The effect is to show us how living and thinking are intimately interwoven. Affections change, hopes are dashed, people die, kites are flown. We feel how the mind keeps reacting learning, rejecting, denying, accepting. absorbing.
I find this trilogy beautiful. Watching it for the first time, I found many passages when, while watching, I could not have said what each play was "about'', where I could not see where Stoppard was heading: but, after the first play's first half-hour or so, I was happy just luxuriating in the sheer texture of the scenes Stoppard sets before us.
Virtually all the acting is of a very high order, and most of the leading roles take their actors to new peaks in their careers
The meanings of the play cohere as you watch, not as narrative but as poetry, and keep growing in recollection.
Alastair Macaulay
Extract from review courtesy of The FinanciaL Times Monday 5 August 2002
NOW BOOKING UNTIL 23 NOVEMBER at the National Theatre.
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