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The Coast of Utopia: Voyage
Mar. 26th, 2012 09:53Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia, Part 1: Voyage. Performed by Shotgun Players, dir. Patrick Dooley.
Tom Stoppard is probably my favorite living playwright, but this is unquestionably not his best play, and the Shotgun Players production--while quite good, and admittedly still in previews--fails to hit the mark 100% of the time.
The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy of plays about the intellectuals and revolutionaries of Russia's 19thC other than Marx and Lenin, the artists who created Russian literature as we know it and the non-communists whose thought and actions would eventually result in the first of Russia's 1917 revolutions: the February Revolution, which was itself overthrown by the more famous October Revolution. That they failed doesn't invalidate them; indeed, the remarkable thing about Russia, as in so many communist revolutions, is that the communists succeeded at all. As with so many Stoppard plays, it's a drama of big ideas uncomfortably inhabiting people whose souls are rarely sized to match, and the play is particularly good at articulating the gender and status divide the Romantic revolution makes apparent among its devotees. All that being said, I think the central problem with this play is that its hero, Alexander Herzen, doesn't appear until the start of the second act, and then (because he's exiled for sedition) only appears in one other scene after that.
( What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, it's Russia! )
All that being said, however, I would definitely recommend this production, and this play, to anyone to whom it sounds interesting.
Tom Stoppard is probably my favorite living playwright, but this is unquestionably not his best play, and the Shotgun Players production--while quite good, and admittedly still in previews--fails to hit the mark 100% of the time.
The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy of plays about the intellectuals and revolutionaries of Russia's 19thC other than Marx and Lenin, the artists who created Russian literature as we know it and the non-communists whose thought and actions would eventually result in the first of Russia's 1917 revolutions: the February Revolution, which was itself overthrown by the more famous October Revolution. That they failed doesn't invalidate them; indeed, the remarkable thing about Russia, as in so many communist revolutions, is that the communists succeeded at all. As with so many Stoppard plays, it's a drama of big ideas uncomfortably inhabiting people whose souls are rarely sized to match, and the play is particularly good at articulating the gender and status divide the Romantic revolution makes apparent among its devotees. All that being said, I think the central problem with this play is that its hero, Alexander Herzen, doesn't appear until the start of the second act, and then (because he's exiled for sedition) only appears in one other scene after that.
( What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, it's Russia! )All that being said, however, I would definitely recommend this production, and this play, to anyone to whom it sounds interesting.
