|
The Coast of Utopia
As Tom Stoppard celebrates his sixty-fifth birthday,
his fascinating new trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia,” has opened at the National
Theatre in London. This is Stoppard’s most serious work so far, dealing with
a group of mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals who seek philosophical
political solutions for their country, tyrannized by Czar Nicholas I, with
censorship and exile for the intelligentsia and slavery for the serfs. With 30
actors in over 70 roles, it is played out against a panoramic background of
moving, curved panels on which are projected country estates, sumptuous
living rooms, verandas, landscapes, seascapes, and even the barricades of the
1848 revolution in Paris. Set in Russia and Europe from 1833 to 1865, when the
seeds of revolt were being planted, the action centers upon Alexander Herzen,
a socialist and humanist, and his fellow aristocrat Mikhail Bakunin, a
revolutionist.
One of Stoppard greatest gifts as a playwright is the
ability to make abstract ideas dramatic. When his play “Hapgood” considered
quantum mechanics and then “Arcadia” explored chaos theory, it was said that
Stoppard “flatters the audience by making them feel cleverer than they are.”
In “The Coast of Utopia,” using the metaphor of a sea voyage, and depicting
actual voyages as well, Stoppard turns political thinking into stylish, witty
dialogue that is delightful to hear and to ponder. At the same time he evokes
family scenes that round out the characters as husbands, wives, parents, and
lovers – eating, partying, or quarrelling. Skeptical of anarchists who see
bloodshed as a means to a brighter future, Herzen observes, “If we can’t
arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the
happiness of those who come after us.” Meeting these historical characters
and their families as living people, we leave the theater better understanding
them and their philosophy. (Read more in Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers,
which Stoppard consulted.)
VoyageIn the first play, Voyage, set in Moscow and St.
Petersburg, the principals embark on their quest for the ideal, utopian
society. Wealthy landowners whose holdings are numbered by the thousands of
serfs (or “souls”) they own, Bakunin (Douglas Henshall) and Herzen (Stephen
Dillane) are intellectuals who view as morally wrong the tyranny the czar and
the plight of the serfs. Various paths are pondered as they seek for the way
to that imaginary, ideal country, Utopia, or even to its coast. “Who’s got
the map?” is a recurrent question.
The repressive spirit that dominates Russia at the time
provides much of the tension in “Voyage,” for there is severe censorship of
the journals in which the men publish their utopian ideals, and read of
others’.  One such publication, the Telegraph, is closed down because of an
unfavorable review of a play that the czar favored. Visssarion Belinsky (Will
Keen) is an impassioned literary critic who believes literature has a sacred
mission: “The Russian people…sees, in the writers of Russia,” he writes to
Gogol, “its only leaders, defenders and saviors, from the darkness of Russian
autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism.” Revolutionist Belinsky believes
“destruction is a creative passion.” Herzen, exiled for his views, has been
allowed to return home, but is confined to Russia. Writer Ivan Turgenev (Guy
Henry) also figures in the trilogy; his wit and his objectivity, presenting
both sides of an argument, remind one of Stoppard.
The principals change their political views as they
change their locales. Finally granted a passport, Herzen goes to Paris, where
the 1848 uprising is taking place, and after the initial celebrations, the
protestors are shot down at the barricades. Bakunin declares this revolution
“the happiest time of my life,” but the Russians’ expectations for the birth
of a true democracy evaporate when the French choose Louis Napoleon as ruler.
Shipwreck
The second play’s title, Shipwreck, treats their dashed hopes and ends
with an actual shipwreck in which Herzen suffers a family tragedy. Storms
herald domestic and national upheavals and contrast with pastoral settings,
while music by Steven Edis provides an effective bridge between dissolving
scenes. The atmosphere of the first two plays is often Chekhovian, as
Bakunin’s and Herzen’s families lounge, picnic, and converse.
In “Shipwreck,” Herzen’s wife, Natalie (Eve Best), is a
free spirit, in love first with girlfriend Natasha (Lucy Whybrow) and then
with handsome German radical poet George Herwegh (Raymond Coulthard).  To help
Natasha marry her lover, Nicholas Ogarev (Simon Day), Natalie visits his
estranged wife (Felicity Dean) to plead for a divorce. The opening scene in a
garden, with women and children occupied by the everyday, contrasts with
later personal and political disruptions, signaled by storms. Unaware of the
affair between Natalie and Herwegh, Herzen invites him and his wife, Emma
(Charlotte Emmerson), to share a house in Nice.
Almost in despair over the tragic loss of his son and
mother and the failure of the second French revolution, Herzen defies an order
to return to Russia and embarks for England. On board ship, he meets (or
dreams of) Bakunin and the two exchange their hopes for Russia. Bakunin sees
salvation in a revolution by the peasants, while deploring Karl Marx’s
manifesto: “He’s such a townie, to him peasants are hardly people, they’re
agriculture, like cows and turnips.” Herzen hopes for Russian socialism, “We
have to go to the people, bring them with us, step by step. But Russia has a
chance. The village commune can be the foundation of true
populism…self-government from the ground up.”
The engrossing political thought gives way to an
emotionally touching personal reflection by Herzen on the death of his son:
“His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s
purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature
doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of
itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of
flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.
Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?”
Salvage
The third play, Salvage, finds Herzen living in
England and founding and writing for The Bell, the first free journal in
Russian, with copies sent to Moscow. He is living with friend Ogarev’s
unstable wife, Natalie, and fathers her three children. He plays host to many
revolutionary refugees who have fled to London, including the Polish leader
Worcell, Italian nationalist Mazzini, and the Hungarian leader in exile,
Kossuth. Bakunin and Herzen are again arguing the best course for Russia,
Bakunin insisting, “How can we make a new Golden Age and set men free again?
By destroying everything that destroyed their freedom.” Ogarev, arriving from
Russia, reports that Herzen’s socialist ideas reported in his journal are
having little effect: “Preaching socialism from London didn’t make you friends
among your friends at home.” And the younger Russian political thinkers
disparage Herzen’s ideas.
“Salvage” opens and ends with a dream by Herzen. At the
beginning, the political émigrés in his dream voice their solutions – while
realistic, everyday dialogue continues onstage. In the final dream, Turgenev
and Marx “have strolled into view like mismatched friends.” Marx
presents his Utopia, in which “a higher reality” is the hoped-for end, after
flames and blood and corpses. Herzen has the last word, and refutes Marx:
“There is no libretto….We need wit and courage to make our way while our way
is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings, and we rob ourselves
if we pardon us by the absolution of historical necessity….A distant end is
not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be closer, the laborer’s
wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal
happiness… Marx and Turgenev ignore him and stroll away.”
Trevor Nunn has done a
magnificent job of directing this epic, with its multiple characters and
settings. Designer William Dudley uses a revolving stage and moving backdrop
panels on which computer-generated images rise from the floor to zoom and
blend. Some of the most impressive stage pictures include an ice-skating rink,
where graceful actors glide, and a fancy-dress party, where the metaphoric
Ginger Cat materializes. In his final dream, Herzen asks Marx, “What kind of
beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for human
sacrifice?”
The handsome period
costumes, also by Mr. Dudley, subtly distinguish their wearers, from dandy
Turgenev to the peasants in the first play and Blue Blouse in the second, “a
desperate, motionless figure” who appears in Herzen’s stylish French
living-room during the 1848 revolution and is asked,. “What do you want?
Bread? I’m afraid bread got left out of the theory. We are bookish people,
with bookish solutions. Prose is our strong point, prose and abstraction.
But everything is going beautifully. . . .you can put your shirt on it which,
I see, you have.”
All the
actors mentioned above are impressive, eloquently clarifying dialogue
that can be complicated as well as witty: “a mixture of small
talk and big talk,” as Mr. Nunn described it recently. He
also revealed that during rehearsal, one hour was cut from the over-all
playing time (now eight and a half hours), and believes the three
plays are best seen in chronological order In presenting
an unforgettable theater experience, Mr. Stoppard, the National
Theatre, and all contributing to this production are to be congratulated
For Tom Stoppard’s life and works, see Archive
of Major Playwrights.
Jumpers
In Tom Stoppard’s 1972 farce Jumpers the
gymnasts, or jumpers, are professors of philosophy, headed by Archie,
the vice-chancellor/dean, in whose faculty we find ethics professor
George Moore (no, not the George Moore, writer
of Principia Ethica, as he must constantly explain). As
the curtain rises, against Vicki Mortimer’s splendid background
of the moon and stars, the Radical-Liberal political party are celebrating
their victory at George’s house, with an acrobatic display by the
professors, June-Moon songs by George’s wife Dotty, and a strip
tease on a swing. Meanwhile, George is phoning the police to complain
about the noise. Suddenly a shot rings out, and the top man on the
acrobats’ pyramid, Professor McFee, is dead.
Enter Inspector Bones (Nicholas Woodeson) to
investigate. With true Stoppardian misunderstanding (like
the mix-up of James Joyce’s and Lenin’s manuscripts in “Travesties”),
George believes Bones is investigating his phone complaint, not
the murder. Bedazzled by Dotty, who is the chief suspect,
Bones joins the household, and along with Archie, makes frequent
visits to Dotty’s bedroom. Under the expert direction of David
Leveaux, the zany goings intensify, via a revolving stage. We never
do find out who committed the murder, the least important item in
antics that combine the physical gymnastics of the jumpers with
the verbal gymnastics.of Stoppard and the mental gymnastics of his
leading character, George.
George Moore (“half of the students believe you
are [the famous] George Moore,” says Archie) holds the Chair
of Ethics, next to the lowest, which is theology. In an excellent,
appealing and detailed performance by Simon Russell Beale, George
is a familiar professorial type, absent-mindedly stepping on his
pet turtle, delighting in the turns of phrase he finds in composing
a paper for a symposium on “Man: Good, Bad, or Indifferent,” dictating
meticulously qualified long sentences to his secretary, testing
theories with a bow and arrow or hare and tortoise.
He reigns in his cluttered study but is insecure and bumbling in
Dotty’s mirrored bedroom. In contrast to the assertive, suave
Archie, well played by Jonathan Hyde, George is questioning and
back-tracking all the time, attempting to prove the existence of
morality and of “an incredible, indescribable and definitely shifty
God:” “I think, therefore God is. Or is it ‘are’?”
In his pursuit of defining “good,” George reduces
to the absurd his method of philosophical reasoning, through
qualifying sentences to a forced conclusion: “…to say this
is a good bacon sandwich is only to say that by the criteria applied
by like-minded lovers of bacon sandwiches, this one is worthy of
approbation. The word good is reducible to other properties
such as crisp, lean and unadulterated by tomato sauce. You
will have seen at once that to a man who likes his bacon sandwiches
underdone, fatty and smothered in ketchup, this would be a rather
poor bacon sandwich.”
Essie Davis is a delightful Dotty, George’s young
wife, who in a glittering outfit looks and sings like Marlene Dietrich
at the opening party, but forgets the lyrics. She is depressed
at seeing the astronauts jumping on the same moon that figures in
her romantic songs. Taking to her bed, she may or may not
be having an affair with Archie, who may or may not be visiting
her as her psychiatrist. His reply to George on this matter
is ambiguous:
Archie: Therapy takes many forms.
George: I had no idea you were
still practicing.
Archie: Oh yes…a bit of law,
a bit of philosophy, a bit of medicine, a
bit of gym…A bit of one and then a bit of the other.
George: You examine her?
Archie: Oh yes, I like to
keep my hand in.
Archie has his own philosophical doubletalk.
He and Bones hear Dotty (offstage} cry “Help!”
Archie: It’s all right
–just exhibitionism; what we psychiatrists call “a cry for help.’
Bones: But it
was a cry for help.
Archie: Perhaps I’m
not making myself clear. All exhibitionism is a cry
for help, but a cry for help as such is only exhibitionism.
All ten jumpers do a fine job, including a near-ballet
when the body of McFee is neatly bundled into a blue plastic bag.
When George asks why McFee would crawl into a plastic bag to shoot
himself, Archie replies: “Hard to say. He always was tidy.”
Stoppard’s own deft answer, when asked whether his plays were intended
to be serious or comic: “It’s a matter of taste whether one says
they’re wonderfully frivolous saddened by occasional seriousness,
or whether there’s a serious play irredeemably ruined by the frivolous
side of this man’s nature.” Performance schedule:
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.
|
