Theatre: At home with men of Russia's history
by Alastair Macaulay
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: Bakunin's sisters, Herzen's wife, the governess to Herzen's children who hands in her resignation. The way the servants are treated, and, above all, the lives and loves of women are crucial threads to the tapestry here. 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. Stoppard adores those moments of conjunction when history is like a VIP lounge: where Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara bump into each other (Travesties), where Housman, Wilde, Ruskin, Pater, and Jowett cross paths (The Invention of Love). But I don't think his sense of history has ever been finer - fuller - than here.
Whether his characters are real for all experts on this area I cannot say, but they are real in the sense in which D.H. Lawrence meant when he wrote that "there is always a water-closet on the premises"; in the sense in which Virginia Woolf meant when she asked readers to imagine Shakespeare's sister.
I fell in love with the trilogy during a scene in Act One of Voyage (Part One) when eight different characters are spread across the stage, sitting and talking, all on different wavelengths, about poetry, the weather, philosophy, romance, and the history of a penknife. The scene becomes important later when Belinsky bursts into a passionate speech, but I was already in its thrall.
The plays move from 1833 to 1865. Act One of Voyage, set on the Bakunin country estate, passes from 1833 to 1841; Act Two, set in Moscow and St Petersburg, starts back in 1834, sometimes explaining things that came up in Act One, and ends in 1844.
Shipwreck, Part Two, takes us from Russia to Germany and France - the Russian thinkers have taken up the life of exile - and from 1846 to 1852, though it, too, at one point doubles back to recapture lost times, poignantly.
Stoppard, a good student of Isaiah Berlin, accords full significance to the revolutionary events of 1848; his characters are haunted by them. But they are haunted by their own lives, too.
Salvage, Part Three, set in England and Geneva, moves steadily forwards from 1853 and 1865, and still the characters are coming to terms with the deaths, joys, heartbreaks, loyalties, and disappointments of bygone years.
Briefly, brilliantly, Herzen, who has become the central figure of Shipwreck and Salvage, ties the whole trilogy together in his last great speech: "History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. A distant end is not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be closer, the labourer's wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness."
By this point, we know we have come a mighty distance. The trilogy ends with Herzen, his family, and his friends, watching a storm (past, present, future) in the distance.
Afterwards, one recalls the many tremendous lines Stoppard gives his characters ... "You didn't say anything for weeks, and you, when you say anything, you say - anything"; "I'm a poet of revolution between revolutions"; "Cynicism fills the air like ash and blights the leaves of the freedom trees"; "There's no such thing as 'everyone everywhere'"; "What you mean by civilisation is your way of life".
"It restores one's faith in theatre", said my companion. Trevor Nunn's National Theatre production is superlative. Of its flaws, the only one I find serious is that the voices are amplified, often excessively so.
William Dudley's designs, which make extensive use of video projections, are a miracle of fluency, and there are images - the cityscape of St Petersburg as seen from a moving boat, landscapes that refract as in a kaleidoscope, a summer dress out of a Monet painting, a video of a shipwreck and the whirlpool of the waves - that memorably enrich the world of these plays.
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. Guy Henry (Turgenev), Will Keen (Belinsky), Douglas Henshall (Bakunin), John Carlyle, Eve Best, Lucy Whybrow, Charlotte Emmerson, Raymond Coulthard, Felicity Dean all do superbly, and Stephen Dillane, apparently acting with that complete relaxation that Gielgud said was crucial to great acting, makes Herzen the heartbeat of the trilogy, as marvellously natural when he is just listening in a chair as when he is racked by the most powerful emotion.
The meanings of the play cohere as you watch, not as narrative but as poetry, and keep growing in recollection.
Financial Times Monday August 5, 2002