We Stoppard-ites knew what to expect. He has been unpicking the birth of the modern mind for years. We’ve had Arcadia (a study of Romanticism as it bites on the Enlightenment’s Classicism). We’ve had The Invention of Love (what were the Classical world’s contribution to the 19th Century’s pansified aestheticism?).

Rationality and passion, reason and neurosis, self-expression and repression. These Stoppard themes naturally enough bring us to Revolutionism – the Enlightenment’s preaching about the person’s liberty brought face to face with the horrors of forceful action. Unlike his characters, we know how ghastly the outcome really is.

So we see lives in which there are personal revolutions, new freedoms and experiments with personal and family life. Free love and all that, always the preserve of the Left, and always one of its more potent attractions.

All this and more is explored in a series of plays which rather break Stoppard’s previous contract with his audiences. Like Bernard Shaw, or Jean Anouilh or Oscar Wilde even, Stoppard up to now has given us conventionally structured plays about ideas. He has also rewarded us with good jokes. In Coast of Utopia, he gives as bum-torture to match nothing since Ken Campbell’s exploration of the birth of “Alternativism” (The Warp), and which comes with a lower joke quotient. And they are cheaper shots, some of them, too.

One’s reaction was mixed. Gratitude for his luminous intelligence and energy conflicted with exasperation that he could not have given the blue pencil fuller rein. Delight at so many issues tackled was tinged with irritation that there is repetition of many of the themes. Pleasure that there is human warmth – portrayals of family life – to relieve the philosophy and politics was tainted by bum-weariness that these distractions kep us locked in the theatre when we knew that this is a think-piece, not a soap opera.

The plays are “epic but intimate” (in another of Faber and Fabers blurbs). There is a huge cast of thinkers, writers, and lovers, but Stoppard focuses especially on two. (With two others, see below, getting a decent look-in.) The cycle begins by majoring on Michael Bakunin, a comically-indecisive scion of a dreamily Chekhovian Russian landowning family. As the plays proceed, we watch as he progresses from youthful enthusiasm and agonising to battle-hardened revolutionary, marvellously unscathed by experience. On stage, he at first looms very large and then as the hours pass, he appears less and less. We never lose sight of him – but we sense he is out there, fighting the fight, whilst we stay with the talkers.

Conversely, early on we see little of the cynical, clever (millionaire) Alexander Herzen, but as the plays follow each other, his role as the Stoppard voice grows, until we begin to see the enterprise as a matter of Herzen’s semi-detached socialism being converted into a deliberate, case-hardened reformism. We know he’s Stoppard’s real hero because whilst Bakunin is something of a joke, Herzen makes them. Herzen comes to suppose that socialism and revolution are likely to be a dream and a disaster respectively, but does believe that Russia’s serfs should be freed. This is the most important good that can be achieved, and it can be achieved. There is, in the third play, huge delight that Herzen seems to have so influenced the Tsar: the serfs have indeed been released, but into landless, hopeless poverty.

So we watch the emphasis shift from the early logic of dreamy, violent revolutionism being beaten-up by history until good sense and experience seem to demand undramatic pragmatism which brings its own failures. This is intellectual and political life as seen by those liberals who tend to conservatism. It is the reformism of an Erasmus (to go way back), or of Isaiah Berlin (to quote the Twentieth century’s best exponent of this view). If I heard Stoppard’s account of his development in these subjects right (it was given in a Channel4/Daily telegraph conference at the British Museum this summer), he is keen on Herzen not least because Berlin is. Herzen, Berlin and Stoppard know their approach is attractive only to resigned realists, but they quite like the way it enrages the romantic. Reformism makes more progress, and is truer than full-on Romanticism to the urge to produce liberty within a real appreciation that force is the greatest enemy of all. But its greater grace, one senses, is that it talks less nonsense of any kind, and in particular, less dangerous nonsense.

These bold themes are indeed large. But Stoppard makes them more difficult to synthesise by wanting to see what the role of thought is more generally. In the first play, The Voyage we are given a pretty good account of what the British call Continental philosophy: Kant and Schelling and Fichte on human perception and what it tells us about the universe. And what we can make of ourselves granted what we know of the universe and the way we see it. But what is the role of human agency? What is the role our intellect as against the role of our emotions? Is the abstract world the higher plane on which we should operate, granted that it is uniquely human? What action is proper? Bakunin and the rest wrestle with these, and then are thrilled to find that Hegel cuts through it all with a manifesto for action.

The Shipwreck gives us an account of the trauma of action. Do intellectuals inspire action or do their adumbrations merely track it? Does experience support action? We are shown a real revolution (Paris in 1848) and what it meant for the intellectuals who have been talking about such events for years. We explore the problem of liberty. Who has the right to interfere with us? Liberty is the right of all of us to live without force being used on us. How can the unfree get liberty without force being deployed? Why are the unfree so useless at exercising power once force has so tendentiously been deployed to win it for them?

Shattered and demoralised, the cast move to the third play, Salvage. Here, our philosophers and activists rattle around London, bickering about their failures and wondering how to proceed. What’s more, they wonder: how is “History” going to move? Indeed – and it’s a constant thread of the plays – is history an organism with a life of its own, using us humans as its puppets? Or is history just what we do? Does does history choose us, or do we choose history? And in the midst of tumult and speculation, men and women love, and bear loss. Stoppard, always a fan of the personal over the abstract, takes us again and again back to Herzen as he tries to construct a way of life which does not fail. Social experiments on a large scale are bound to fail, he says. Three, or maybe two, are the largest numbers of peole who might manage them well. Perhaps even those numbers are too great.

If you like, the first way of seeing these plays is as political history: real events in countries and families unfold. The second way to see them is as intellectual history: the words and deeds of thoughtful people as they influence and reflect events. And then there is the third way: that these plays are about philosophy, pure and simple, and almost divorced from events.

There is, god help us, a fourth way. Stoppard tells us a good deal about the way the artistic impulse tangles with the philosophical one. He delights in the critic, Vissarion Belinsky: uncouth, passionate, concrete, this man discovers and promotes Russian literary genius, and believes that literature may be what even poor backward Russia might learn to do, and which carries with it a greater chance of reflecting and improving life than philosophy and revolution. Again, the personal, the particular; the felt and the experienced – these are infinitely sounder for Stoppard than bullying abstract nouns.

ends