The three plays, “Voyage,” “Shipwreck” and “Salvage,” follow the circle of thinkers around Aleksandr Herzen, founder of Russian socialism. Where other London hits this season rely on the pyrotechnics of flying cars (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”) or appearances by Hollywood movie stars (Woody Harrelson in “On an Average Day”), “The Coast of Utopia” dazzles with words and ideas. Stuffed with research and spanning two continents and 30-odd years, the play shows Herzen and his friends talking. Lots. They debate the possibility of a peasant revolution, the importance of literature, Russia’s unfortunate fate to be marooned between East and West and Tsar Nicholas I’s hobnailed repression.
But this being Stoppard–a humanistic playwright as well as a cerebral one–they also bicker about silk dressing gowns and how to make a decent cup of coffee. Over the years, critics have accused Stoppard of divorcing feelings from intellect. Not here. “Voyage,” though partly a study of these thinkers’ interest in German Romanticism during the 1830s and 1840s, is also high family drama, complete with overbearing mammas, incestuous undertones, dashed romantic hopes and tragic early deaths.
Nobody breathes life into ideas–or the people who make them–like Stoppard. As coauthor of the script for “Shakespeare in Love,” he extrapolated from the few facts known about the bard to make the great man into a lovesick puppy with writer’s block. In “Arcadia” and “The Invention of Love,” he explored the debate between classical and romantic esthetics through the prism of his characters’ love pangs. Among the premises that underlie the new trilogy is the unfashionable idea that an intelligentsia actually matters. Its heroes include writers and critics who, quaintly, think that art not only reflects society, but can shape it. And it’s not just the Russians raging around the stage who believe this, but Stoppard himself. “When you go abroad, you feel that culture is integral, not a little treat for a day off,” Stoppard said recently. “Here [in Britain], we are always talking about art and society. Art is bloody society.”
Strong words for the P. Diddy era. But more than any other modern dramatist, Stoppard has narrowed the gap between the intellectual and the popular artist. His zigzags between haute and mass culture can be dizzying. Just after a revival of “Jumpers,” a play about God and morality, he was approached by Mick Jagger and David Bowie, who asked him to write a movie for them. At another point the man who effortlessly blends the complexities of chaos theory, physics and German Romanticism into his plays was a script doctor on “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” During interviews about “Shakespeare in Love,” a British journalist asked whether Shakespeare would be writing movies were he alive today. “No,” quipped Stoppard. “He’d be rewriting them.”
Rewriting is something the characters in “The Coast of Utopia” do a lot of, since they had to work under strict censorship. “Voyage” features a hilarious scene in which a publisher asks a writer who has penned a damning indictment of Russia to change just two words: “Russia” and “we.” Stoppard, who grew up in Singapore and India, has spent most of his writing career in Britain and hasn’t personally endured state censorship. But he has explored the theme of intellectual freedom both on and off the stage. His involvement with the periodical Index on Censorship and the international writers’ group PEN has led him to defend dissident writers. Working closely with author and later President Vaclav Havel, Stoppard was involved in Charter 77, a civil-rights movement in communist Czechoslovakia.
“The Coast of Utopia,” however, also explores one unintended benefit of censorship–its curious power to give ideas weight. When the critic Bakunin makes it to Paris–a mecca during the 1840s for those who wished to publish republican or revolutionary ideas–he speaks longingly of the airtight cultural atmosphere in Russia, where ideas seem to matter more than they do in the freedom of France. Publishing in Paris, he says, “wouldn’t mean anything, in this din of hacks and famous names.” Back home he’s censored, but students discuss works “half the night and pass copies around,” says the critic wistfully. “If the writers here only knew, they’d pack their bags for Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
Ironically, Hollywood is the only entity that has messed with Stoppard’s freedom of expression. “The Hollywood studio system distorts the point of view of who the artists are,” he said in a 1994 interview. As Ira Nadel chronicles in his new biography “Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard,” the 65-year-old has been involved with writing about or for the movies since he began as a reporter for a Bristol paper back in the 1950s. Stoppard started screenwriting during the late 1960s, but even early on, knew that writing for the screen meant relinquishing artistic control.
The huge sums of money involved in moviemaking mean scripts “are much too important to be left to writers,” he wrote in 1969. “When we write a film we are putting ourselves into the hands of gangsters and poltroons.” The collaborative constraints of screenwriting clearly doesn’t bother him tremendously: he’s gone on to adapt, doctor or write for art-house cineastes like Joseph Losey and Rainer Werner Fassbinder as well as for big-budget directors like Steven Spielberg and Michael Apted.
Stoppard’s filmic sense shows up in “The Coast of Utopia,” which has the short scenes, big-crowd numbers and range of locations of a blockbuster. By the time the third play is over, the trilogy’s 30 actors have worn 271 gorgeously designed costumes and 96 different wigs. Set designer William Dudley creates scenes by projecting evocative videos on a curved back wall. When Bakunin arrives in Paris, the Place de la Concorde swirls into view with all the spine-tingling excitement of a Spielberg panning shot. Stoppard can be obscure, but he’s never stuffy. History is treated as a plaything, and ideas are celebrated like movie stars.
