Voyage

Voyage is the first part of Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia, an epic but also intimate drama of romantics and revolutionaries in an age of emperors. Beginning in 1833, Voyage takes up the story of the future anarchist Michael Bakunin when his stage was still Premukhino, the Bakunin family estate, and Moscow under the repressive rule of Tsar Nicolas I, and when Michael and his four sisters, like many upper-class Russians of their generation, were in the thrall of German idealistic philosophy. 'I knew there were families,' remarks his friend, the brilliant young critic Vissarion Belinsky. 'I come from a family. But I had no idea.' But family life, with its passionate ties and conflagrations, all in the cause of exalted love and idealism, is left behind for ever when Michael at the age of twenty-six sets sail for Germany, waved goodbye by his newest friend, the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russian history, Alexander Herzen: the move from pure thought to revolutionary action is on the horizon.

Tom Stoppard's work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'n' Roll, The Hard Problem and Leopoldstadt. His radio plays include If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died, In the Native State and Darkside (incorporating Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon). Television work includes Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle and Parade's End. Film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma and Anna Karenina.