The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s eight-hour trilogy about intellectuals in pre-revolutionary 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.”

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.”

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