Tom Stoppards Trilogy Utopia
  The words are spoken by a dapper Russian landowner and patriarch,
seated at the end of a well-appointed dinner table in 1833. The suggestion
is that you have come upon the characters onstage in mid-conversation and
that the conversation is likely to continue. That is a monumental
understatement. During the more than nine hours required to perform all three of its
parts, "The Coast of Utopia" takes the love of a good argument to
spectacular extremes unknown in the theater since the heyday of George
Bernard Shaw. The explosive, eloquent characters in the beautifully acted
production of Mr. Stoppard's new work, which has been directed in bravura
style by Trevor Nunn, are not making small talk. No, the talk is as big as talk gets. For what are being discussed are,
among other things, the fate of a nation, the philosophy of knowledge, the
nature of history, the role of literature, the limits of love and the as
yet undiscovered social system by which people can live in harmony and
equality. There is also an abiding pained consciousness that language —
and "Utopia" speaks in various foreign tongues — is desperately
inadequate. "Words just lead you on," says one character. "They arrange themselves
every which way," filled with "promises they can't keep." It is fitting
that among the trilogy's several stunning coups de th´¼tre the most
memorable involves a deaf child surrounded by thundering silence. The view from the 21st century confirms of course that the debates that
dominate "Utopia" are not winnable. But any awareness of such futility
does not stop the arguments' participants — who have resonant names like
Bakunin, Turgenev, Marx, Belinsky and Herzen — from continuing to inspire,
inflame, enrage, adore and bore one another. In this respect theatergoers
will find it very easy to identify with them. "The Coast of Utopia" has received courteous but very mixed reviews
here, with "ambitious" looming admiringly and damningly. Yet on the single
Saturday on which I saw all three plays (a time commitment of roughly 12
hours, allowing for bolted meals at the National's coffee bars), there
were cancellation lines for every show. And as far as I could tell, no one
failed to return after any of the intermissions, although I heard a few
people grumbling about Stoppard's penchant for overwriting. "The Coast of Utopia" deserves to be popular, though not for the
reasons you might expect. It's not that the play's historical insights,
which in truth aren't all that original, are good for you, like a
high-fiber diet for the brain. Or that the Stoppardian epigrams (planted
amid some frankly tedious speech making) sparkle. What keeps audience members in their seats is Mr. Stoppard's passion
and Mr. Nunn's gift for translating that heat into vibrantly human
performances. They are provided by a superb cast led by the magnetic
Stephen Dillane (a Tony winner for the revival of Mr. Stoppard's "Real
Thing") as Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century radical theorist and editor,
and Eve Best, an emotional powerhouse as Herzen's wife. The pleasures of "Utopia," which is presented as a fairly
straightforward narrative by Stoppard standards, are those of a fat novel
that for all its long-windedness is a page turner. From his "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967) to "The
Invention of Love" (1997), Mr. Stoppard has consistently assumed the role
of the playwright as super-student, luxuriating in the joys of research
and in the opportunity to take every side of a question. In this sense he
is very much like the ever-searching intellectuals of "Utopia" who have,
above all, the courage of their contradictions. The plays ("Voyage," "Shipwreck" and "Salvage") follow an elastic set
of adversarial friends over 25 years, from their shared, largely
privileged youth in Russia to exile in Western Europe. It is a period
during which the survivors age severely (and most convincingly, by
theatrical standards). Yet as their role models shift from Schelling to
Kant to Hegel to Marx, they hold on to an adolescent combativeness and a
precocious student's enthusiasm for new ideas. That "Utopia" feels shaped by the same sensibility accounts for much of
what is wonderful and annoying in the plays. Despite its leisurely length,
there is a quality of breathlessness throughout the trilogy, like that of
a man who has so much to say, he fears his tongue will never keep up with
his mind. There is also the sometimes suffocating feeling of Mr. Stoppard as a
researcher who is so enamored of his material that he cannot bear to leave
out a single good anecdote he has come across. "Voyage," the first part of
the trilogy, is by the far the most artfully arranged and judiciously
edited of the three. But even as the work, like its characters, grows more
ragged with time, it never comes close to collapsing. The energy isn't only cerebral. Like "The Invention of Love," a
portrait of the poet A. E. Housman, "Utopia" aches with an awareness of
the irreconcilable tensions between ideas and mortal substance. The mind can never fully impose itself upon or transcend life itself,
as Herzen comes to accept; real life is too wayward and people too varied
for that. "Utopia" both laments and celebrates this condition. The ways in which Mr. Nunn's production achieves this double tone are
ravishing. With the help of David Hersey's virtuosic lighting, William
Dudley — who designed the sets, costumes and videos — brilliantly keeps
"Utopia" in heady visual flight as it segues from a Russian dacha to the
ballrooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg to the streets of Paris in 1848 and
finally to the staggering assortment of houses in England and on the
Continent that Herzen called home. The idea of a world in unstoppable motion is conveyed most literally by
an immense turntable, which takes up most of the stage of the Olivier
Theater and which revolves obligingly to change the audience's perspective
on a scene. Behind, on a cycloramic screen, are projected beautifully
wrought images of landscapes and architecture that meld ingeniously with
the more solid elements of the set. The impression is of flux and things ephemeral, which makes the
of-the-moment vividness of the performances all the more poignant. The
ensemble members, who number several dozen in some 70 roles, are
remarkably accomplished portraitists. They bring to fruition the impulse
that must have inspired Mr. Stoppard to create their characters, that
sense of gleeful curiosity that can overtake a reader when one fine detail
suddenly brings a historical figure to life. It should be pointed out that these performances and Mr. Nunn's staging
go a long way in providing the novelistic richness and empathy of
"Utopia." Unlike much of Mr. Stoppard's work, "Utopia" lives far more
compellingly on the stage than on the page. To cite standouts is to some degree arbitrary, since nearly everyone is
first rate. But I find I'm still especially haunted by Douglas Henshall,
who makes inevitable the fatuous but ardent Bakunin's transformation from
aristocrat into anarchist; Will Keen, who manages to be both tongue-tied
and irresistibly verbose as the literary critic Belinksy; and Ms. Best,
who brings a heartbreaking quality of longing and frustrated fire to three
different roles that speak eloquently of what it meant to be a woman in
those times, among those men. There are also, at the show's center, two men who embody different
approaches to the relativism that shapes "Utopia": the passionately
engaged and arrogant Herzen and the elegantly detached and equally
arrogant novelist Turgenev, impeccably embodied by Mr. Dillane and Guy
Henry. Both have more than a little in common with Mr. Stoppard. Consider the following dialogue: "To value what is relative to your
circumstances, and let others value what's relative to theirs — you agree
with me," Turgenev says, toward the trilogy's end, to Herzen, who answers
him fiercely. "But I fought my way here with loss of blood," he says,
"because it matters to me, and you're in my ditch, reposing with your hat
over your face, because nothing matters to you very much." The exchange is thoroughly typical of "Utopia." It is also throughly
typical that the argument cannot be completed, both because one of
Herzen's daughters has run into the room in a tantrum and because
Turgenev's stomach hurts. Life will keep barging in on the loftiest discussions and the most
intricate metaphors. Which is why in the end you are likely to stay on
board for the long, long journey that is "Utopia." |
ONDON, Aug. 20 — Three little words open the floodgates:
"Speaking of which. . . " This is the unexceptional phrase that so
modestly begins "The Coast of Utopia," Tom Stoppard's engrossing and
exasperating trilogy of plays at the Royal National Theater here about the
intellectual forebears of the Russian Revolution.
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