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From The Times
June 12, 2007
It’s Utopia for Stoppard as he tops record
with seven Tonys
James Bone in New York
The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s eight-hour trilogy about intellectuals in prerevolutionary Russia, has won seven Tony Awards to become the most acclaimed play in
Broadway history.
The British playwright’s epic topped the previous record of six Tonys for a drama set by
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesmanin 1949 and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys last year.
“I would be more than happy to have equalled the playwright of Death of a Salesman and a
contemporary of mine, Alan Bennett,” Stoppard said after the awards ceremony on Sunday
night.
The Coast of Utopia is the fourth Stoppard play to win the Tony for best play, following
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1968), Travesties (1976) and The Real Thing(1984).
Stoppard, 69, said: “I feel a bit nostalgic, actually, because this year it’s 40 years since I first
came here with a play, and I’m sentimental enough to want to start by thanking the New York
theatre for having me, for good times and good friends. It was a different planet in 1967, the
Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got
10 per cent of the gross.”
Related Links
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Full list of Tony Award winners
The trilogy, judged as a single play, won Tonys for Jack O’Brien, the director, and Jennifer
Ehle and Billy Crudup, the featured actors. It swept the technical awards, picking up the
prizes for sets, costumes and lighting. O’Brien, an American who has previously directed
Stoppard’s Hapgood and The Invention of Love, also at the nonprofit Lincoln Centre in New
York, hailed the awards as proof of the seriousness of the American stage. “We are in the
middle of a cultural revolution where these young actors who are very, very conversant with
television and film want to keep their chops up. They want to keep driving. God bless. We
have to let them,” he said.
Ehle, best known for her role in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, praised the
producers “for having the courage to do The Coast Of Utopia”. It was the second time that the
actress, who played three different roles in the trilogy, had won a Tony for a Stoppard play.
Her first was for the 2000 revival of The Real Thing.
Journey’s End, R. C. Sherriff’s 1920s drama about British soldiers in the trenches of the First
World War, enjoyed a bittersweet success by winning the Tony for best revival of a play only
hours after being forced to close.
Overall, though, it proved a disappointing night for Britons as they lost out to their American
rivals, who beat them to American theatre’s most prestigious awards at Radio City Music
Hall.
However, Bob Crowley, the Irish set designer who worked on The Coast of Utopia and Mary
Poppins, won set-design prizes for the play and the musical. “This is slightly indecent,
actually,” he said. “I’m completely gobsmacked.”