Volume 54, Number 9 · May 31, 2007
Stoppard's Romance
By Anthony Grafton
The Coast of Utopia
a trilogy by Tom Stoppard, directed by Jack O'Brien
at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York, October 17, 2006–May 13, 2007
The Coast of Utopia
by Tom Stoppard
Grove, 384 pp., $49.95
The marathon version of Tom Stoppard's Russian trilogy is charged with excitement. When I saw the three plays in one day at the end of March, virtually the entire audience stayed until the end. Some of those present—who ranged from eager students to slippered pantaloons—clutched battered blue copies of Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers. Others congratulated one another enthusiastically on seeing plays 'that are so much more demanding than the usual.' One young man who passed me during an interval on the plaza outside the Vivian Beaumont, talking and gesturing as wildly as the young Russian intellectuals in the first of Stoppard's plays, cried 'Knowledge! I want more knowledge' as he went by, smiling seraphically.
Review, 4578 words
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