About the Play:

The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy of 3 sequential plays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage.

The plays explore a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term "intelligentsia" was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of politics, love, loss and betrayal. In The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard presents an inspired examination of the struggle between romantic anarchy, Utopian idealism and practical reformation.

What people say:

"Exhilarating! Pulses with the dizzying, arrogance and anxiety of a new generation moving as fast as it can." — New York Times

"Broadway will struggle during this and possibly many other seasons to come up with an event to top this rich and highly literate drama." — Variety

"Unforgettable and unmissable! An experience of life as much as an experience of art." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomás Straüssler) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. His family had to flee to Singapore at the onset of the Nazi invasion. The family moved to England in 1946, where he left school at the age of seventeen to work for The Western Daily Press, in Bristol. He was catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, for which he was awarded a Tony, the Prix Italia, the New York Critic's Award, and Plays and Players Award for Best New Play. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, and in 1998 shared a best original screenplay Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. He was knighted in 1997.