"The Coast of Utopia" a 10-hour-long trilogy of plays — comprising "Voyage," "Shipwreck" and "Salvage" — was originally written in 2002 by Tom Stoppard for the National Theatre in London. An award-winning English playwright, Stoppard first shot to fame with "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" in 1966 and was knighted for his accomplishments in 1997.
Now age 72, Stoppard teams with Japan's leading director, Yukio Ninagawa, to bring "The Coast of Utopia" to Japan. To begin this epic staging, Ninagawa, 73, reflects today's zeitgeist by giving the play a contemporary context. The cast, wearing their rehearsal clothing, sit at a table listening to speeches by U.S. President Barack Obama and Japan's new leader, Yukio Hatoyama, as the sounds of bombing assail the audience's ears.
Then the play proper opens and plunges us into the world of high-level chattering classes in a strife-torn Russia of the 1830s to 1860s. We meet "the father of Russian socialism" Alexander Herzen (Hiroshi Abe), the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Masnobu Katsumura) and the novelist Ivan Turgenev (Tetsuya Bessho).