Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Play 1

Description

The three plays tell the story of the Russian radical opposition in the years before and after the European revolutions of 1848. The trilogy spans the early 1830s and the late 1860s and features Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism and many of his contemporaries, including Michael Bakunin, the progenitor of anarchism, the writer Ivan Turgenev and the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky. The Coast of Utopia, with more than fifty characters and with the action moving from the Bakunin country estate to Moscow, St Petersburg, Paris and London has an epic for its subject but one which is experienced largely through the private lives of 'the Romantic Exiles.'

Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His early years were spent in Singapore, India and, from 1946, England, after his mother married an officer in the British Army. Leaving school at seventeen, Stoppard worked as a reporter in Bristol, before moving to London to work as a theatre critic and feature writer. During this period he began to write plays for radio and for the stage and published his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.His first major success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was produced in London in 1967 at the Old Vic after critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival. Subsequent plays include Enter a Free Man, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with Andre Previn), After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love. His radio pla