Katherine Duncan-Jones on how Tom Stoppard's study of philosophy and revolution slips its moorings

The Coast of Utopia is our young century's most ambitious theatrical work to date. Its three plays require more than 40 adult actors and half a dozen children, trawling locations in Russia, France, England and Switzerland, and cover a time-span of 33 years, from 1833-65. In addition to the 80 or so characters whom we see and hear, others, unseen, haunt the sequence: the poet Pushkin; the philosopher Hegel; the feminist novelist George Sand; the opera singer Pauline Viardot.

Why does the message of this sprawling work - or even its painful, if predictable, discovery that there is no message - require so much detail? After all, in the early 16th century, Thomas More already conceived of Utopia as a place that neither can nor should exist; and as Dr Johnson said, a couple of centuries later, "most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things". (It is surprising, perhaps, that Stoppard did not weave this remark somewhere into his vast cat's cradle of literary quotations and allusions.)

The obsessions that drive these plays may be less political than they seem. At 65, Stoppard has become like the drowning man whose previous life passes before his eyes (see interview with Mary Riddell, NS, 8 July). His vision is both personal: complex historical movements lie behind his own family's journey to the west - and artistic: stocktaking his own writings and those of his theatrical masters, Shakespeare and Chekhov. Personal obsession may account for a design fault. Alexander Herzen (whose name happens to mean "heart") is made the central figure and defining consciousness, and one can see why. His gradualist and non-violent ideals were not put to the test, and therefore never shown to fail. They are manifestly attractive today. Also, his wonderful memoirs of the struggles of the young revolutionaries and of his own turbulent marriage and family life have given Stoppard rich source material. Yet, even played with masterly poise by Stephen Dillane, Herzen does not have sufficient theatrical presence to support Utopia's weight - he is too gentle, too tolerant, too cerebral. A character who should have been Chorus is forced to be Protagonist.

His later years in London offer plenty of scope for social comedy - messy adultery, constant house moves, drunken parties for assembled Russian exiles - but there is no longer much scope for heroism or tragedy. The trilogy ends, in Salvage, not with a bang but with a series of whimpers and titters. Those revolutionaries who have survived Shipwreck are reduced to caricatures both of their former selves and of Russian-ness, tedious spongers and fantasists who drown their disappointments in oceans of alcohol.

The opening play, Voyage, offers only a glimpse of Herzen in a windy St Petersburg. It begins and ends like quintessen-tial Chekhov. In its long opening scene, a middle-aged aristocrat, Alexander Bakunin (John Carlisle), presides with unchallenged smugness over his bored daughters and exhausted serfs, his snobbish wife and huge estate. At the close, ten years later, all is in ruins. One daughter is dead of consumption, another wretchedly mismarried. Bakunin's intellectual son is in flight from tsarist oppression and his forests are sold off. Lear-like, the old man is virtually blind and now touchingly dependent on a single daughter.

The central scenes move beyond Chekhovian pastoral, and are haunted by Hamlet rather than Lear. A network of young men who resemble either Hamlet or his real-life Russian counterpart, Pushkin, push painfully towards exile. Foremost is the young Mikhail Bakunin, engagingly performed by Douglas Henshall. His bouncy eagerness to find solutions both to his own problems and to Russia's in contemporary German philosophers - first Friedrich Schelling, then Johann Gottlieb Fichte - is charmingly impractical. The more he tries to challenge his privileged origins, the more pampered does he seem, especially in the company of his four sisters, who are as restless and idealistic as their brother, but are denied his freedoms. Even in this all-star cast, Eve Best excels as the doomed Liubov, and her physical resemblance to a girlish George Eliot is astonishing. Another Hamlet type is Bakunin's Moscow University chum Nikolai Stankevich (Raymond Coulthard), whose emotional repression provides the perfect foil to Bakunin's rumbustiousness. Yet another is the brittle malcontent Vissarion Belinsky (Will Keen), wretchedly poor and wretchedly uneducated, yet determined despite these handicaps to be an unsparing critic of Russian literature and Russia alike. There are excellent farcical scenes in which, almost Basil Fawlty-like, he glosses over his lack of French and ownership of a mistress.

The second half of Voyage reprises the same ten years, showing events in Moscow and St Petersburg of which only partial echoes have reached the provinces. The foppish Turgenev (Guy Henry) introduces a welcome note of worldly cynicism. He, more than Herzen, proves to be the plays' mainstay. The world of literary journals whose all-powerful editors find themselves suddenly felled by censorship is wittily but chillingly explored. The penultimate scene, a masked ball stalked by a menacing Ginger Cat, alludes to Mikhail Bulgakov's phantasmagoric Master and Margarita.

As its title suggests, Shipwreck is a tragedy. It is more uneven than Voyage. For instance, the adultery of Herzen's wife is handled unconvincingly, although it happens to be "true". None of the women is so appealing as the four sisters of the first play. Yet, at times, it is more powerful. Stoppard again uses the technique of reprising a scene already shown, with poignant effect. The dying Belinsky - Will Keen's coughs are most alarming - dreams of the great things he could write wearing a Parisian silk dressing gown. But the vain attempts of Herzen's wife Natalie to call out to her deaf child suggest the ultimate impossibility of any effective communication, whether political or personal, and Belinsky's dressing gown, left on stage unworn, stands for much larger disappointments.

France's failed revolution of 1848 is the trilogy's narrative turning point, and provides a sequence in which the ensemble cast and visual spectacle are at their best. Trevor Nunn is particularly skilful in setting big, noisy scenes against others that are simple and quiet, at times even wordless, as when the deaf child Kolya spins his top front stage. In plays where the audience seems at risk of drowning not in sea water but speechifying, this is welcome. It might have been better to stop there.

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage is at the Olivier Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 (020 7452 3000) until 19 October

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website