Tom Stoppard Doing Rewrites on The Coast of Utopia for Lincoln Center
By Robert Simonson
07 Jun 2004
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Tom Stoppard
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Playwright Tom Stoppard is significantly revising his massive trilogy The Coast of Utopia in preparation for the Lincoln Center Theater New York premiere in 2005, said Jack O'Brien backstage at the Tony Awards ceremony.
O'Brien will direct the work. He previously directed Stoppard's The Invention of Love on Broadway.
"Tom and I have been working assiduously over the last year and a half. Tom is very available. He's really relishing going back over the material," said O'Brien, who added, "I love Tom and I love his working and it's been a happy collaboration. There's a continuity."
O'Brien won a 2004 Tony for his work on Henry IV.
The Coast of Utopia consists of three plays titled Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage and is centered on the political and philosophical idealism and debates of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, examining the movements that excited artists and thinkers in those days. The show moves chronologically on from the 1830s, when the great Romantic poet Pushkin was still alive and his epic poem "Eugene Onegin" was all the rage in educated circles.
The main characters are the anarchist Michael Bakunin (played by Douglas Henshall in London) who was to challenge Marx (played by Paul Ritter) for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev (played by Guy Henry), author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky (played by Will Keen); and Alexander Herzen (played by Stephen Dillane).
The critical reaction to The Coast of Utopia was mixed.
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