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More than 1,000
people sat through the first night of a three-part, nine-hour Tom
Stoppard play at London's National Theatre.
The sold-out premiere
of The Coast of Utopia was followed by three curtain calls
and an enthusiastic ovation, a spokeswoman for the theatre said.
About 1,000 people
watched all three parts, she continued, while the rest of the audience
in the 1,150 capacity Olivier auditorium were watching only one
or two parts.
The atmosphere
at the end of the performance was "exhausted but elated", she said.
There will be
eight more marathon trilogy sessions with the work also scheduled
in its component parts.
Single idea
The Coast of Utopia
is a sequence of essentially self-contained plays telling the stories
of notorious Russian radicals fighting for political freedom in
the 19th Century.
Sir Tom, who won
an Oscar for his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, said
his latest work had grown out of ideas for a single play.
"I began to think
I would need two plays," he told the Daily Telegraph.
"Then I thought,
let's go for broke."
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