The Coast of Utopia: Voyage
Mar. 26th, 2012 09:53![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyStoppard, 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.
The play starts, and ends, at the Bakunin estate of Premukino, whence spoiled nobleman and future father of anarchism Mikhail Bakunin will eventually make his way to history. In the meantime, like the privileged, absolutely unsympathetic asshole idealist he is, Mikhail spends his time sponging off his father's money and trying to control the lives of his four sisters, which he does with admirable aplomb. Over the next eight years, Mikhail and his sisters voyage out to Moscow and Sankt Petersburg and back and meet and bring home a number of like-minded intellectuals and revolutionaries, with predictably complicated results.
The first half takes place entirely at Premukino, and the problem here--and throughout the play--is that most of the time scenes go by so quickly it's difficult to find enough characterization to hang onto, and that Mikhail, again, is totally unsympathetic. He ruins his sisters' lives without a thought or even recognition of the fact that he's done so, and from the play it's hard to square his eventual articulation of anarchism as anything but a spoiled child rebelling against parental rules. If he were as anarchistic as his philosophy would lead you to believe, he'd undoubtedly have slept with his sister Tatiana, with whom he's in love, at some point. She'd have been down for it, according to the play.
Mikhail and his family are spoiled, petulant children for the most part--though his sisters, particularly Varenka and Liubov, eventually blunder into a kind of wisdom--and the first act is saved by the arrival of Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic with little French and less German who believes that Russia doesn't have a literature yet. Belinsky has the courage to speak the truth, that Premukino is founded on slaveholding and the exploitation of human beings in bondage by their fellow human beings, and it's no wonder that he's driven back to Moscow by the hypocrisy of the Bakunins' paradise, and that he was my second-favorite character overall.
I literally thought, when Alexander Herzen started raging about the injustices of Russia at the beginning of the second act, "Oh thank god, now we can have some adults!" Herzen is clearly Stoppard's favorite, and in this production he was also played by one of the best performers, Patrick Jones, who brings the lines to life in a way that other people in the cast just didn't--at times I was forced to wonder whether some of the actors actually understood what they were saying, which is never a good thing to wonder about actors but is fairly common in all but top-notch Stoppard productions. I've given up on not being the only one who finds obscure parts of the script hilarious at Stoppard shows, such as, in this play, whenever anyone goes on about Kant and Hegel. When Herzen tells Belinsky, in the second scene he has, that people don't storm the Bastille because history zig-zags but that history zig-zags because people storm the Bastille because they've had enough and can't take it anymore, I wanted to stand up and cheer. I think, too, that most people just aren't aware that the emancipation of the serfs didn't take place until 1861 in Russia, and that all of Premukino is made possible by slavery, which adds a certain salver to the first act and to Bakunin's unrelenting hypocrisy.
As I said, Herzen is Stoppard's hero--he gets all the anachronisms and many of the best lines--and the political side of the play has more life to it than the domestic one, which isn't entirely Stoppard's fault--of necessity, the Premukino crew are less self-aware and mordantly sarcastic than the Moscow/Sankt Petersburg reformist crew, for whom the shadow of the state censor and the specter of police informers are a constant fact of life, and it shows; it's still easier to laugh, darkly, with the cast than at them. There's the trademark bit of Stoppardian surrealism when Herzen, musing about how "It wasn't until I saw a six-foot ginger cat toast the Essence of things that I understood the meaning of exile," more or less directly conjures the six-foot ginger cat who wanders around the next scene, but some of the flash scenes were too obscure even for me--it took me until the next morning to work out that the guy who stands up against a door looking spooked while some special effects boom in the middle of the second act was Pushkin just before he went to his fatal duel.
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.
The play starts, and ends, at the Bakunin estate of Premukino, whence spoiled nobleman and future father of anarchism Mikhail Bakunin will eventually make his way to history. In the meantime, like the privileged, absolutely unsympathetic asshole idealist he is, Mikhail spends his time sponging off his father's money and trying to control the lives of his four sisters, which he does with admirable aplomb. Over the next eight years, Mikhail and his sisters voyage out to Moscow and Sankt Petersburg and back and meet and bring home a number of like-minded intellectuals and revolutionaries, with predictably complicated results.
The first half takes place entirely at Premukino, and the problem here--and throughout the play--is that most of the time scenes go by so quickly it's difficult to find enough characterization to hang onto, and that Mikhail, again, is totally unsympathetic. He ruins his sisters' lives without a thought or even recognition of the fact that he's done so, and from the play it's hard to square his eventual articulation of anarchism as anything but a spoiled child rebelling against parental rules. If he were as anarchistic as his philosophy would lead you to believe, he'd undoubtedly have slept with his sister Tatiana, with whom he's in love, at some point. She'd have been down for it, according to the play.
Mikhail and his family are spoiled, petulant children for the most part--though his sisters, particularly Varenka and Liubov, eventually blunder into a kind of wisdom--and the first act is saved by the arrival of Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic with little French and less German who believes that Russia doesn't have a literature yet. Belinsky has the courage to speak the truth, that Premukino is founded on slaveholding and the exploitation of human beings in bondage by their fellow human beings, and it's no wonder that he's driven back to Moscow by the hypocrisy of the Bakunins' paradise, and that he was my second-favorite character overall.
I literally thought, when Alexander Herzen started raging about the injustices of Russia at the beginning of the second act, "Oh thank god, now we can have some adults!" Herzen is clearly Stoppard's favorite, and in this production he was also played by one of the best performers, Patrick Jones, who brings the lines to life in a way that other people in the cast just didn't--at times I was forced to wonder whether some of the actors actually understood what they were saying, which is never a good thing to wonder about actors but is fairly common in all but top-notch Stoppard productions. I've given up on not being the only one who finds obscure parts of the script hilarious at Stoppard shows, such as, in this play, whenever anyone goes on about Kant and Hegel. When Herzen tells Belinsky, in the second scene he has, that people don't storm the Bastille because history zig-zags but that history zig-zags because people storm the Bastille because they've had enough and can't take it anymore, I wanted to stand up and cheer. I think, too, that most people just aren't aware that the emancipation of the serfs didn't take place until 1861 in Russia, and that all of Premukino is made possible by slavery, which adds a certain salver to the first act and to Bakunin's unrelenting hypocrisy.
As I said, Herzen is Stoppard's hero--he gets all the anachronisms and many of the best lines--and the political side of the play has more life to it than the domestic one, which isn't entirely Stoppard's fault--of necessity, the Premukino crew are less self-aware and mordantly sarcastic than the Moscow/Sankt Petersburg reformist crew, for whom the shadow of the state censor and the specter of police informers are a constant fact of life, and it shows; it's still easier to laugh, darkly, with the cast than at them. There's the trademark bit of Stoppardian surrealism when Herzen, musing about how "It wasn't until I saw a six-foot ginger cat toast the Essence of things that I understood the meaning of exile," more or less directly conjures the six-foot ginger cat who wanders around the next scene, but some of the flash scenes were too obscure even for me--it took me until the next morning to work out that the guy who stands up against a door looking spooked while some special effects boom in the middle of the second act was Pushkin just before he went to his fatal duel.
All that being said, however, I would definitely recommend this production, and this play, to anyone to whom it sounds interesting.
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Date: 2012-03-27 00:59 (UTC)- Mikhail
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Date: 2012-03-28 06:51 (UTC)