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Granted, Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky are not exactly household names even to the most committed contemporary theatergoer. And spirited discourse on Hegelian dialectic, no matter how impassioned, lacks the comfortable predictability of joke-swapping "Producers" or Lea Salonga shimmying her way through "Flower Drum Song". Yet, household, and all the images this word conjures up, of nucleus, of family, of community, forms the core of Tom Stoppard's ambitious new trilogy of plays, gathered under the umbrella title The Coast of Utopia and given a sparkling debut at the National's Olivier Theatre. Like "The Invention of Love", "Arcadia", and a number of other titles in the lengthy and impressive Stoppard canon, Utopia is potential debilitatingly dry historical fact brought to vibrant, human and often very humorous life by the playwright's singular genius for character insight and astonishing repartee. Spanning the stuttering development of Russia's intellectual frontier from 1833 through 1868, Utopia wrestles with a nation's struggle for identity through its leaders' struggle to define it. "Look at us!" critic Belinsky rails at a Bakunin family gathering early in Voyage, the opening play of the trilogy. "A gigantic child with a tiny head stuffed full of idolatry for everything foreign, and a huge inert body abandoned to its own muck." Since Peter the Great's reforms of the early 18th-Century, Russia's educated minority had grown increasingly alienated from a sense of who they were as a country and a people. Russia seemed neither of the East nor the West, instead stitching together haphazard scraps of both cultures into an ill-fitting national garment. By the early 19th-Century, Russia was suffering from an identity crisis of epic and crippling proportions. Then, in the early 1830s, young leaders clandestinely agitating for reform began to emerge from the collective sludge of national ennui and confusion. Future socialist Alexander Herzen (a suavely assured Stephen Dillane), future anarchist Michael Bakunin (Douglas Henshall's angry young man), and future critic Vissarion Belinsky (a brilliantly controlled Will Keen) begin to lock arms and horns as they struggle to graft the arcane Western philosophies of, first, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, later, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling upon an illiterate and disparately backward nation still awaiting its first railway system. Herzen, Bakunin and Belinsky form the triumvirate backbone of the trilogy and, although Stoppard clearly admires this trio, he does not idolize them. Indeed, he seems often to take a sage's benevolent glee in exposing their solipsistic self-absorption and youthful naivete. "Nobody seems to understand (fellow young wannabe philosopher Michael) Stankovich and I are engaged in a life or death struggle over material forces to unite our spirit with the Universal -- and he has to go back to Moscow tomorrow!" the young Bakunin explodes at his sisters after one too many sibling interruptions. All three plays gleam with such affectionately deriding gems, expertly burnished by director Trevor Nunn, who is blessed with a large and uniformly stellar cast led by Keen's superb turn as the brilliant but socially clumsy Belinsky. Thrashing about the stage in the throes of an excruciating ineptness, Keen's Belinsky seems to speak without being fully aware of where his words are coming from, as though he were some hapless medium channeling torrents of brilliance from an uncontrollable, unknown source. It is a riveting performance. Also exceptional are the formidable Eve Best, who is possessed of a face that demands she play every female role Jane Austen ever wrote, and who here fully inhabits several diverse and contrasting roles, among them Bakunin's vivacious young sister Liubov in Voyage, and Herzen's beloved and doomed wife, Natalie in the second play, Shipwreck. The venerable John Carlisle also pulls multiple duty, bringing his charismatic presence and melodious voice to, most notably, the Bakunin family patriarch, Alexander. It is director Nunn's over-arching achievement here that he establishes and maintains a true and consistent sense of family, of belonging, of being united towards a common cause across all three plays and nine-plus hours. The constant sparring and testing of one another is an expression as much of affection and trust as it is an exchange of conflicting philosophies and ideas, and offers a glimpse of how evenings amongst the educated may have been spent in the days before the numbing narcotic of television made staring at "The Weakest Link" an intellectual exercise. And just what is this cause Stoppard's characters hold in common? "To raise a human being to the highest degree of which she is capable!" another of Ms. Best's characters exclaims late in Salvage, the trilogy's concluding play. Indeed, in Utopia, Stoppard is reaching beyond the often academically abstract longings of his protagonists to grasp at a larger truth: that to set foot upon the coast of "utopia" as human beings, we must aspire to reach highest ground both as individuals and as a people, without losing touch with the physical world or the pleasures and fulfillment life's single moments are capable of offering. "Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day," Herzen reminds us near the close of Shipwreck. "It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow. Later is too late." "The
Coast of Utopia" at the Royal National's Olivier Theatre, South Bank,
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