The Coast of Utopia (review)

In an interview with Mel Gussow several years ago, Tom Stoppard remarked that, "I am a playwright who is interested in ideas and is forced to invent characters to express those ideas." This is certainly the case in his latest work, The Coast of Utopia, staged by the Royal National Theatre and regarded as one of the most ambitious and eagerly anticipated events of London's 2002 summer theatre season. Consisting of three sequential plays (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), The Coast of Utopia is a dramatic biography of a group of nineteenth-century Russian radicals and focuses on their efforts to create political change in a country ravaged by poverty, injustice, and centuries of reactionary Tsarist rule. It is an extravaganza: thirty actors playing seventy parts, 416 costumes, and (according [End Page 348] [Begin Page 350] to the National Theatre's publicity department) ninety-six wigs. The three plays (each slightly over three hours long) are challenging and provocative, yet less than wholly satisfying. In many ways, the trilogy leaves the audience wanting less

Art · Art history · Biography · Injustice · Political science · Politics · Publicity · Reactionary · Trilogy · Utopia · History · Law · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction