Unstoppable Stoppard
Utopia unattainable is the topic of his grand-scale new trilogy
By Matt Wolf
On July 3, Sir Tom Stoppard turned 65. A month later, he opened the most ambitious theatrical undertaking of his career—a nine-hour trilogy of plays under the collective title The Coast of Utopia. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about this dramatist’s refusal in any way to wind down, as he continues on with as singular a career as the British theatre has known.
When another well-established authorial Sir—Alan Ayckbourn, two years Stoppard’s junior—opened his own trilogy, Damsels in Distress, at the Duchess Theatre on the West End at the beginning of September, it felt almost like business as usual, coming from a British theatre mainstay who has now written as many plays (63) as he is years old. But Stoppard plays are a rarer commodity. His last, The Invention of Love in 1997, marked director Richard Eyre’s final venture in a nine-year National Theatre regime—so the arrival, near the end of Trevor Nunn’s five-and-a-half-year National tenure, of not one but three Stoppard works represented very big news, indeed. As a headline in the Times of London put it, the playwright is “shy but not retiring.”
And a good thing, too. Is The Coast of Utopia perfect? Hardly. Nor were the reviews, following its day-long premiere on Aug. 3, the across-the-board raves one might have anticipated. (Oddly, Damsels in Distress got collectively better notices from the British press.) But for at least its first full third, and then in sizable chunks thereafter, Stoppard’s Utopia—in a fluid, emotionally sympathetic staging by Nunn, the first director of Arcadia—did exactly what the subsidized theatre in any country exists to do: take a large-scale gamble on big themes, while utilizing the full resources of a uniquely resourceful building.
In temporal terms, Nunn’s production does, of course, have several antecedents at this address: The National twice in the last 12 years has produced The Mysteries, director Bill Bryden’s three-evening staging of Tony Harrison’s version of the medieval mystery plays. More directly comparable are David Hare’s three plays about the professions in Britain, which culminated in October 1993 with the daylong return of Racing Demon (about the clergy) and Murmuring Judges (about the law), alongside the premiere of Hare’s dramatization of the inner workings of the Labour Party, The Absence of War. The difference is that those plays actually first were seen across three-and-a-half years, whereas Stoppard’s trio all had their debut on the same marathon day.
But Stoppard’s topic, like Hare’s, is nothing less than the way we live now, even if Stoppard has chosen to filter his analysis through a look at the way a generation-plus of Russian intelligentsia were deciding how to live then. I doubt every theatregoer knew such names as Alexander Herzen or Vissarion Belinsky before they took their seats at 11 o’clock that sunny August morning, only to emerge from the entire event 12 hours later. (Of the thinkers’ gallery assembled by Stoppard, Ivan Turgenev remains the best known to the general public.) But one of the achievements of the plays—Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage—is their capacity to draw a spectator into 32 turbulent years of conflict and debate that resonate no less richly today.
To be sure, the specifics of the Socialism argued over in the play may not matter as much in a new century beset by worries about entirely separate “isms” that are beyond the ideological and geographical scope of Stoppard’s chosen terrain. And yet, it was indelibly affecting when the eloquent Herzen of Stephen Dillane—the 2000 Tony-winner for the Broadway revival of Stoppard’s The Real Thing—gave full vent in the closing moments of the final of the three plays to a modus vivendi worth remembering right now: “We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us,” argues Herzen, before coming down on the side of “the summer lightning of personal happiness” that, he feels, represents humankind’s best way forward.
As the banner title for Stoppard's plays suggests, The Coast of Utopia is brave enough to hint at the fact that we may never reach that promised land, doomed as we are instead to inhabit a dystopic reality that constitutes a separate realm altogether. And to that end, the trilogy found itself, somewhat surprisingly, of a piece with other summer openings in London. Next door in the National’s transformed Lyttelton space, actress-turned-director Kathryn Hunter was staging a rare theatrical outing for The Birds, Aristophanes’ satiric portrait of a lapsed utopia. And on the West End, director Jeremy Sams and a highly accomplished cast headed by Aden Gillett and Emma Chambers were reviving Michael Frayn’s Benefactors, a defining play from 1984 on exactly the same topic. Listening to Frayn’s quartet talk as the liberal ideals of an era and social class come tumbling down around them, one could have been eavesdropping on the thinkers assembled on the Bakunin estate in the mid-19th-century in Stoppard’s opening play, Voyage: “When it turned out the necessary height was a meter or two above my reach, and all those fine phrases burst like bubbles, there was nowhere to go except back home feeling worthless and now without a job.”
Voyage, as it happens, is by some measure the best of the three plays, as well as being the only one that might work if produced on its own, without the other two. In part, its success derives from the richly affective ebb and flow of the rural life posited in the first act, set against the tumultuous urban upheaval of the second, to which that first half then becomes the cunning, quintessentially Stoppardian antithesis: You watch the second act, all the while feeding the first act through it in your mind.
Stoppard has said that it was Nunn’s production on the same stage several years previously of Gorky’s Summerfolk that got him embarked on this project to begin with—he had wanted to write a play for that earlier production’s set, and in the grand Russian manner. (The English theatre has a notable precedent for such ventures in Shaw’s overtly Chekhovian Heartbreak House.) And so Voyage can be seen to possess the emotional and physical sweep of Chekhov and Gorky as it juxtaposes a gathering of George Sand?quoting sisters with the feisty, irascible men—Douglas Henshall’s scraggly-haired Michael Bakunin chief among them—who have made their way to the big city, big ideas in tow.
The entire cast is at its absolute peak in this play, with several actors seizing a spotlight they rarely get in the six hours that follow. Watching John Carlisle’s Alexander Bakunin (the landowner-father to Michael) speak of “another sunset, another season nearer God” is to witness a reckoning with mortality of the most elegant and elegiac sort. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the take-no-prisoners ardor of the young critic and newspaper editor, Belinsky. His is the only character that makes one wish Stoppard had somewhat rewritten history, since Belinsky’s disappearance from the third play—he has died by the time of Salvage—deprives the audience of fierce-eyed Will Keen’s career-making performance. (Keen is one of four in the Utopia company who have been with the plays from their early workshop straight through.)
The remaining two plays adopt a more linear approach, as the focus narrows toward Herzen, a somewhat more self-aware equivalent to Candide. (There’s a very real whiff of Candide’s famous garden—not to mention the return to work at the end of Uncle Vanya—to the qualified utopia that Herzen ends up endorsing by the close of Salvage.) One might wish for fewer reminders of Les Misérables and even Cats in some of Nunn’s flourishes. (On the other hand, what is a director to do, given that Shipwreck covers the very period and place sung of in Les Miz?) Likewise, you might start to question Stoppard’s apparent, and highly understandable, desire to incorporate every bit of research, lest any salient detail be left out.
On the topic of details, it’s worth noting that Stoppard himself doesn’t exactly welcome the kind of investigations he has carried out in Utopia and, as regards A.E. Housman, in The Invention of Love. Published this summer just in time for The Coast of Utopia was Ira Nadel’s Double Act (released in the U.S. by Palgrave Macmillan as Tom Stoppard: A Life), a hefty, if unauthorized, account of the playwright’s life. Stoppard’s response all along to the book had been not to impede Nadel’s inquiries but not to collaborate with the writer, either: Stoppard the playwright-biographer apparently wasn’t keen to be (if one can coin a word) biographed.
As was true of The Invention of Love, which reached New York in a separate American staging from Jack O’Brien that easily surpassed its National forebear, The Coast of Utopia may benefit in overall impact and textual refinement from future productions; the sheer exigencies of getting the whole thing on its feet in the premiere cannot have been easy. “It will be Trevor who decides what, if anything, happens to the show,” says Stoppard, “if anybody seriously wants it.” (Several American regional theatres have already expressed interest, and Lincoln Center Theater’s Bernard Gersten was among the press-day notables in attendance, along with Mike Nichols.)
For the moment, the National can be proud that it devoted six months of programming in its largest auditorium—the trilogy closes Nov. 23, to be followed in the Olivier by, of all things, a Nunn-directed revival of Anything Goes—to a project that has dared to think big while so many theatres are content to think small. And whatever else the legacy left by The Coast of Utopia, no one will ever again be able to accuse Nunn’s National of preferring the tried-and-tested old to the shock and scope of the new.
Matt
Wolf writes regularly on theatre in London for this magazine and a wide
range of other publications.
Housman à
la Mode
by Celia Wren
Vissarion Belinsky is not a household name. Nor is Mikhail Bakunin—unless your household moonlights as a center for anarchist studies. But Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia may hoist these revolutionaries a little higher on the public radar screen, if 1997’s The Invention of Love is anything to go by.
“Stoppard’s play has probably done more than anything else to raise awareness of A.E. Housman’s life and writings,” comments Archie Burnett, a Boston University scholar who spent 15 years editing The Poems of A.E. Housman for Oxford University Press. A new Stoppard play will attract larger audiences than a biography or scholarly edition, he observes: “When they have seen the play, then they may well go on to read about Housman or (better) read Housman. But this is only to say that, as Hamlet knew, the play’s the thing for raising awareness.”
Most important, Burnett goes on, “What Stoppard certainly did is highlight how passionate a figure Housman was—miss that, and you miss the most important thing about him. What Stoppard succeeded in doing was in raising awareness of Housman’s passionate devotion not only to Moses Jackson but to literature and to scholarship—and in suggesting connections between them.”
Jim Page, the chairman of the U.K.-based Housman Society, observes, more cautiously, that the poet has never been out of vogue. “Soldiers in both World Wars really did have A Shropshire Lad in their top pocket,” he points out. “However there is no doubt that the poet’s reputation must have benefited from Stoppard’s play. Above all, knowledge about the man must have greatly increased. AEH tends to be known just as the author of A Shropshire Lad, but now masses of people actually realize that he was first and foremost a classical scholar.” This surge of recognition was not a foregone conclusion, in his opinion. “When I first heard that Tom S. was writing a play about Housman, I was incredulous. How could one write a drama about one who lived such an extraordinarily dull life? But I was not taking into account Sir Tom’s brilliance as a playwright.” The 300-member Housman Society was so impressed with Stoppard’s accomplishment, in fact, that it recently elected the playwright as one of its vice presidents.
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