In the London theatre, unlike New York, there is no “season”: a hot ticket is as likely to open in July as November. And so it is that, on a gorgeous English August day (53° and drizzling), while Broadway is slumbering out in the Hamptons, le tout londres is packed into the National Theatre for The Coast of Utopia, the new trilogy by Tom Stoppard: three plays, each over three hours, played with intermissions in a twelve-hour marathon, an evening out that takes up all the afternoon and much of the morning too, and offers little more physical discomfort than, say, flying coach to New Zealand. The question on the theatergoing class’s lips is: Why would Sir Tom do this to us?

I suspect the answer is: Because he can. When he wrote his first hit back in the Sixties, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard was admirably straightforward. Asked by someone, “What’s it about?,” he replied, “It’s about to make me extremely rich.” And so it did, since when he’s led a charmed life of Olivier Awards and Oscars and knighthoods. On Broadway, Stoppard has been a reliable supplier of the so-called “snob hit”—the Brit import that catches the fancy of the local audience—in part because he’s brainy without being pompous. This is a rarer combination than one might expect. A few years ago, Harold Pinter mounted an absurd campaign to get one of the few West End theatres not named for a specific personage—the