NT Education Workpack The Coast of Utopia The Trilogy 2 The personal and the political 2 The ‘bit players’ in the human story 2 nationaltheatre.org.ukthe Stoppard Trilogy What is wrong with this picture?: the ‘accursed questions’ 2 The ferment of ideas 3 the Coast of Utopia Making drama out of history: the playwright’s approach 3 Voyage w Shipwreck w Salvage Creating a visual kaleidoscope: the designer’s World premiere of three new plays by Tom Stoppard challenge 4 Voyage 5 Growing up in paradise: Premukhino 5 Four Sisters 5 Written work and further study 6 Shipwreck 7 1848: the year of demagogues, revolutionaries ‘Passages of breathtaking beauty... I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds’ Guardian and tin soldiers 7 ‘Moments that catch at the heart... both beautiful and profound’ Daily Telegraph The two Natalies 7 “Nobody in theatre today can match Stoppard for a combination of sinuous argument, Written work and further study 8 intellectual élan and sheer coruscating wit… Sunday Times “A sumptuous Trevor Nunn production, gorgeously rigged out by its designer William Dudley, crewed by luminous actors.” Salvage 9 The Observer A forgotten feminist: Malwida von Meysenbug 9 Journey’s end: Herzen’s credo 9 Written work and further study 10 ‘Stoppard’s epic success... Nothing of such ambition, daring or scope has marked the National’s 38-year history’ Epilogue 11 Evening Standard ‘Heroically ambitious... ‘I find this trilogy beautiful... What happened next? 11 I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds’ It restores one’s faith in theatre’ The continuing quest for utopias 12 Guardian Financial Times ‘As funny, as moving, as anything Stoppard has written... a comic tour de force’ Daily Telegraph For discussion 13 Company for the Trilogy Janine Duvitski Jennifer Scott Malden Kemal Sylvester Director Associate Director Thoma s Ar nol d Charlotte Emmerson Sarah Manton Sam Troughton Trevor Nunn Stephen Rayne Eve Best Rachel Ferjani Anna Maxwell Martin David Verrey Set, Costume & Music Video Designer Steven Edis Company for the Trilogy Thomas Arnold, Eve Best, JohnJohn Carlisle, Carlisle Martin Chamberlain,Guy Henry Raymond Coulthard,Iain Simon Mitchell Day, Felicity Dean,Lucy Stephen Whybrow Dillane, Janine Duvitski, Charlotte Emmerson, Martin Chamberlain Douglas Henshall John Nolan William Dudley Movement Director Rachel Ferjani, Guy Henry, Douglas Henshall, Richard Hollis, Jasmine Hyde, Jack James, Will Keen, Jennifer Scott Malden, SarahChildrenManton, from Anna the Maxwell Martin, Iain Mitchell, JohnDavid Nolan, Bolger Raymond Coulthard Richard Hollis Paul Ritter Lighting Designer Related material 14 Paul Ritter, Nick Sampson, Jonathan Slinger, Janet Spencer-Turner, Kemal Sylvester, Sam Troughton, David Verrey, LucyJackie Whybrow Palmer & Stage Children from the Jackie Palmer Stage SchoolSound Designer Simon Day Jasmine Hyde Nick Sampson David Hersey Trevor Nunn William Dudley David Hersey Stephen Rayne Steven EdisSchool David Bolger PaulPaul GroothuisGroothuis Director Set, Costume & Video Designer FelicityLighting Dean Designer Jack JamesAssociate DirectorJonathan SlingerMusic Movement Director Sound Designer History/ideas 14 Stephen Dillane Will Keen Janet Spencer-Turner Royal National Theatre Fiction 15 Barclays is a premiere partner South Bank, London SE1 of the National Theatre Poster; designed by Michael Mayhew, photo by Ivan Kyncl, printed by Augustus Martin © Royal National Theatre (registered charity) 020 7452 3000 Stage and film on video 15 The Coast of Utopia Director Music NT Education Workpack written by by Tom Stoppard Trevor Nunn Steven Edis National Theatre Helen Rappaport Russian consultant for The Coast Designer Movement Director South Bank of Utopia. Further production details: William Dudley David Bolger London SE1 9PX Editor www.nationaltheatre.org.uk Lighting Designer Sound Designer Dinah Wood David Hersey Paul Groothuis T 020 7452 3388 F 020 7452 3380 Design Associate Director Alexis Bailey Stephen Rayne E education@ nationaltheatre.org.uk Patrick Eley The trilogy The personal and the political Utopia is a moving human story: of personal ‘If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit suffering, of love and bereavement, of hopes beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those abandoned and renewed, of friendships broken and who come after us’ (Herzen: Shipwreck, Act 2, p. finally reconciled. Above all, the trilogy is a 100) testament to the true nature of love and friendship – between Herzen and Bakunin, Herzen and Ogarev, In its exploration of the various ways in which and Herzen and his wife Natalie – relationships 19th-century revolutionaries and thinkers tried and tested to the limits by political differences as well failed to establish political utopias, and with them as acts of personal betrayal. In weaving the organize the future of others, The Coast of Utopia domestic lives of his real-life heroes into the charts the rise of a new and influential class in historical fabric of nineteenth-century history, Russia – the intelligentsia. The political, moral and Stoppard counterpoints the individual experience literary debates that preoccupied its members of personal tragedy with the sweep of historic between 1833 and 1868, both within and outside events, providing a discourse not only on the so- their native country, provide the backdrop to a called ‘accursed questions’ which dominated journey that begins on a provincial Russian estate in nineteenth-century Russian radical thought, but 1833. We follow the story of Stoppard’s real-life also an exploration of the human condition itself. protagonists – the socialist thinker and publisher Alexander Herzen, the anarchist Michael Bakunin, The ‘bit players’ in the human story the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the writer Ivan Turgenev and the poet Nicholas Ogarev – as well as The rich and complex subject matter of Coast of that of their sisters, wives, lovers and children, Utopia is an extraordinary undertaking for any through travel, exile abroad, and, in some cases, playwright working outside Russia. Whilst the name untimely death. In 1848 some of them become of Bakunin might be vaguely familiar here (if only caught up in the revolutions that ravage many for his association with other political misfits of European cities that year, prompting further the oft-demonized ‘loony left’), Herzen – a major dispersal of the group into various émigré enclaves, figure in the pantheon of Russian political thinkers Herzen moving from Paris, to Nice, to London, and – is surprisingly little known in Britain, even in finally Geneva. As the play closes, his old friend intellectual circles. The literary critic, Vissarion Bakunin, returns from years of imprisonment and Belinsky, who dominated Russian literary criticism exile in Russia. during his short, frantic life, is unheard of. Will Keen and Douglas Henshall Underpinning the politics, the debates and the big A supporting cast of friends, hangers-on and photo Ivan Kyncl political fellow travellers, all of them equally vivid ideas that are the driving force of The Coast of and idiosyncratic historical figures, make up this collection of the largely forgotten heretics and dreamers of nineteenth-century history, many of whom were briefly, and sometimes ignominiously caught up in the fast-moving events of 1848. Stoppard admits to a particular affection for these marginalized figures. Not least among them, too, are the women in the story: the Bakunin sisters, the three Natalies: Herzen, Tuchkov and Beyer; the émigré German feminists Malwida von Meysenbug, Emma Herwegh and Johanna Kinkel, and the matriarchs Luisa Haag and Varvara Bakunin. What is wrong with this picture? – ‘The accursed questions’ The ambitious text of The Coast of Utopia throws up a wide range of thought-provoking arguments, broaching as it does a succession of fundamental national theatre education workpack 2 The trilogy debates of the time, which in Russia began with the government might exert a stranglehold over civil discussion of German Romantic philosophy in the and political liberties, but it could never control 1830s. Each play hangs on several key events or that most precious commodity – ideas, the free arguments, which provide both the student of the flow of which, channelled by Herzen in the pages text and the interested theatregoer with a of The Bell, would be the lifeblood of all considerable resource for further research, reading disaffected Russians, everywhere. and informed argument. These relate to Russia’s position in relation to European civilization and Making drama out of history: the playwright’s history – reflected in the debate between the approach Slavophiles and Westerners in Shipwreck – to man’s Tom Stoppard has readily admitted that writing The place in the universe, to the nature of personal Coast of Utopia was the most arduous thing he has liberty, and the justification – or not – for violent ever done. As long ago as the mid-1960s he had revolution in the quest to liberate oppressed first entertained the idea of writing a play about nations from authoritarian rule. In Voyage, Herzen Russia, initially having the ‘very abstract desire’ to poses what will be one of the fundamental and write something naturalistic in the manner of recurring questions of the play: ‘What is wrong with Chekhov. The idea gathered ground in the late this picture?’ What, he asks, is wrong with tsarist 1990s, under the guiding intellectual force of the Russia, a country crippled by its outmoded, feudal writings of Isaiah Berlin, in particular his seminal systems, by its censorship and political despotism; work, Russian Thinkers. Reading it prompted and, more to the point, how can Russians of Stoppard to begin contemplating a single play conscience put it right? about Alexander Herzen – of whose ideas Berlin was a lifelong and most passionate advocate. But as Whilst much of the story takes place in Europe, The Stoppard began reading around the subject, so the Coast of Utopia is also the story of Russia itself project morphed into something far more during this period, if seen only through the ambitious: ‘I began to think I’d need two plays.