95 Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (2002)

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Of the British playwrights who made their names in the 1960s, Tom Stoppard was the closest thing to a rock star, with his plump lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and what the critic Kenneth Tynan in The Observer called “costly-casual dandyism.” A friend as well as a doppelgänger of Mick Jagger, Stoppard later wrote a play, Rock ’n’ Roll, about the power of music to undermine tyrannies, in this case his native Czechoslovakia. Stoppard is an émigré; his family fled the Nazis just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Bowie had firsthand experience of music’s power himself. On June 7, 1987, he played a concert in West Berlin that some believe paved the way for the collapse of the Berlin Wall two years later. It was the third show on the European leg of the much-mocked Glass Spider tour. The stage at Platz der Republik was adjacent to the Wall and a large crowd had gathered on the East Berlin side to hear the music. Realizing what was happening, Bowie addressed this “unofficial” crowd directly before launching into “Heroes.” Rioting broke out as people chanted, “The wall must fall,” and “Gorby get us out”; there were more than two hundred arrests.

“It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done,” Bowie remembered in 2003 to Rolling Stone. “I was in tears. There were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we could hear them cheering and singing from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart and I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again. It was so touching.”

Two observations. One, The Coast of Utopia is the only playscript on Bowie’s list. Two, it’s an unusual choice, being neither a stone-cold classic from Stoppard’s early imperial phase (e.g., Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties) nor one of his mid-period attempts to place his trademark wit and erudition at the service of ordinary human emotions (The Real Thing, about the pain of infidelity). Although the Broadway version directed by Jack O’Brien won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2007, nearly five years after Trevor Nunn’s original production closed in London, The Coast of Utopia is generally more admired than loved. A trilogy with a total running time of over nine hours, it is enormously demanding of both actors and audience. What about it bewitched Bowie so? Its sheer chutzpah, probably—and Stoppard’s ability to grab hold of a difficult subject and wrestle an evening’s glittering entertainment out of it.

The Coast of Utopia’s main theme is the necessity of idealism. Without it, what will become of us? How will we ever learn the best way to organize and govern ourselves? Working in a naturalistic, Chekhovian mode, Stoppard charts the lives of a group of writers and political philosophers in nineteenth-century Russia, starting in 1833 at the country estate belonging to the family of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and ending thirty-five years later in Switzerland. Characters like Bakunin, literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, and the early socialist theorist Alexander Herzen dream of utopias and live in fear of brutal suppression. At the same time, they revel in their status as rock star–like revolutionaries.

Tsar Nicholas I was a ruthless autocrat, but Stoppard’s view is that the radicals’ craving for attention got the better of them. Herzen and his associates preferred to live and work under his rule than flee to Spain or France, because in Russia they had adoring young fans who hung on their every word. Of course, as the play shows, many Russian intellectuals did end up as refugees in England and other European countries. In glamorous exile, holed up in a rented villa overlooking Lake Geneva, the charismatic Herzen caps the final play in the trilogy, Salvage, with an impassioned speech warning against nihilism and the urge to destroy things and people in pursuit of a perfect society. Stoppard described this in The Guardian as “the notion that the ‘leader’ has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise—if you’d be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut.…” But Marx, who might have benefited from hearing it, has already left the room.