Voyage

In 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 (Ethan Hawke) and Herzen (Brian F. O’Byrne) are intellectuals who view as morally wrong the tyranny of  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 (Billy Crudup) 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 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 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 (Jennifer Ehle), is a free spirit, in love first with girlfriend Natasha and then with handsome German radical poet George Herwegh (David Harbour).  To help Natasha marry her lover, Nicholas Ogarev (Josh Hamilton), Natalie visits his estranged wife 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, 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.”

Jack O’Brien has done a fine job of directing this epic, with its multiple characters and settings.  Designers Bob Crowley and Scott Pask use a revolving stage and moving backdrop panels on which computer-generated images rise from the floor to zoom and blend and create impressive stage pictures. The handsome period costumes by Catherine Zuber subtly distinguish their wearers, from dandy Turgenev to the huddled serfs 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.”  In presenting an unforgettable theater experience, Mr. Stoppard, the National Theatre, which presented this work originally, and Lincoln Center are to be congratulated.  For Tom Stoppard’s life and works, see Archive of Major Playwrights.(Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, N.Y., N.Y. Phone: 212-239-6200)

                                     The Vertical Hour

David Hare’s “The Vertical Hour” at the Music Box Theater, deals with the emotional journey of a woman (Julianne Moore), an American former war reporter, now an academic expert on international relations who supports the war in Iraq as “humane intervention.”  When her lover , a physical therapist, takes her to meet his father, Oliver (Bill Nighy), an English doctor who has retreated to Wales after his failed marriage, the two are totally at odds over the war.  As the subtext to their political arguments develops into an erotic attraction, he tries to make her see the realities of Iraq, while she insists “I don’t think the mess that’s followed invalidates the original decision.”

As did “Stuff Happens,” his previous work, also seen in New York,  Mr. Hare’s new play has the rare quality of making ideas dramatic, of developing and changing characters as he moves the action, and of presenting both sides of an argument.  When Oliver discloses that he is against the war, disbelieving Nadia asks, “From the beginning?”  “Let’s just say,” answers Oliver, I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea of what the operation would look like.”

Directed by Sam Mendes and set in a Shropshire garden designed by Scott Pask, the actors give faultless portrayals of this unusual triangle, not only Miss Moore and Mr.Nighy, but also Andrew Scott as the son, resentful that his seductive father is captivating Nadia.  Attractively lean and interestingly wrinkled, Mr. Naghy invests his role with such appealing irony as well as anguish that he captivates the audience as well.  Surely he is Tony-bound (having already won a Golden Globe as the father in BBC television’s “Gideon’s Daughter”). (Music Box Theater, 239 W. 45^th Street, N.Y., N.Y., 10036.  Phone: 212-239-6200)

                                                Frost/Nixon

Frank Langella and Michael Sheen, the two principals in Peter Morgan’s London hit “Frost/Nixon” repeat their roles on Broadway beginning April 22.   Opening at the Donmar Theatre in the West End and transferring to the larger Gielgud, this is an engrossing drama about the real-life television interviews in 1977 between talk-show host David Frost (Sheen) and disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon (Langella). Mr. Morgan also wrote the screen play for “The Queen,” in which Mr. Sheen plays Tony Blair.

At the time of the Frost/Nixon interviews, both parties were in a decline and anxious to restore their earlier prominence.  Directed by Michael Grandage, the two are immediate contrasts, Sheen’s Frost impeccably dressed in a Savile Row blazer, and Nixon in a business suit, greedily grabbing from his agent the down payment check of the agreed-upon $50,000.  At first the interviews go badly, with Nixon intent on long-winded recollections that bolster his reputation, the two in armchairs and above them a huge tv monitor  reflecting the conversation.

Finally, having uncovered earlier undisclosed information, a desperate Frost goes on the attack.  He moves in for the kill and achieves what no one else had accomplished until that moment: Nixon’s confession of guilt and saying, at long last, that he is sorry.  As he does confess, the huge monitor provides a closeup of Mr. Langella’s desperate, guilty, self-hating face.  Brilliant theatre that is all the more so because it is true.

                                         Coram Boy

Helen Edmundson’s stage adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s children’s novel of the same name, has been a hit at the National Theatre in London, and will arrive in New York in April.  Set in 18^th century England, it deals with two orphans at the Coram Hospital for Foundlings: Toby, saved from an African slave ship, and Aaron, the abandoned son of the heir to a great estate.  It is a tale of two cities, London and Gloucester, and treats themes of love, friendship, and betrayal, loss and discovery, fathers and sons.  Philip Pullman describes it as an “almost Gothic drama” with “dastardly villains, cold-hearted aristocrats, devoted friends, and passionate lovers, set against a backdrop of cruelty, music, and murder.”  Composer Handel, one of the supporters of Captain Coram, who founded the orphanage,  figures in the play, which features the “Hallelujah Chorus” from his “Messiah.” (Imperial Theater, 249 W. 45th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10036. Phone: 212-239-6200)

A Moon for the Misbegotten 

Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten is a postscript to his greatest tragedy, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in which his own family, called the Tyrones, live out a harrowing day of blame, retribution, and forgiveness.  Perhaps the author felt that work failed to account for elder brother Jamie’s addiction to booze and his cynicism, so after his death from alcoholism in 1923, O’Neill composed the second work, which sees Jamie at center stage in a long night’s journey.

In the sell-out hit production at London’s Old Vic Theatre, where Kevin Spacey is artristic director, the action takes place at the run-down tenant farm of Phil Hogan, whose three sons have left him with only their tough, gawky sister Josie (Eve Best) to do the farming.  The father (who prefers resting to working) and daughter hear a rumor that their landlord, Jamie Tyrone (Mr. Spacey), might sell their farm to a haughty rich American neighbor.  They plot to make Jamie even drunker than usual, get him into bed with Josie, who is reputed to be a trollop, and when they are discovered by shotgun-wielding Phil, the two will marry, and thus the farm will be saved. The property hardly seems worth saving, a ramshackle wood house in arid surroundings backed by unsteady utility poles stretching into the distance.

After what seems like a long exposition, the drama begins when Mr. Spacey enters as Jamie. He is already half drunk; yet the audience senses the instant understanding between him and Josie.  Even though each is jesting and covering up real feelings with pretense, there is the recognition by each that beneath the mask – Jamie as a cynic, Josie as a loose woman – the other is different from the role played for the public.  Jamie is a soul in torment, anguished by guilt, deadened by liquor, “a dead man walking behind his own coffin,” while Josie for all her bravura is actually a virgin, and vulnerable. But their body language tells us that each cares for the other, as Jamie promises to return that night.

 Although he does so, much later than promised, Josie still plans to put her plot into action and plies him with liquor.  For the first time, under her influence, with his head on her breast, Jamie discovers that the liquor has no effect. No longer cynically deluding himself, he is able to confess that his self-torment stems from his train trip back to New York from California, where he had gone to bring back the body of his beloved mother.  He had promised her to quit drinking, and had carried out the pledge until that trip, where he took up with “a fat pig of a whore,” began drinking, and was too drunk to attend his mother’s funeral.

As Jamie, Mr. Spacey again proves to be foremost among actors of O’Neill.  All of the self-loathing, grief, and torment are here, along with the disgust: “when I poison people they stay poisoned.”  Yet he is able to confess to Josie the truth that has been gnawing at his soul, and under the influence of her warmth, to achieve peace.  And only with Jamie is Josie, superbly interpreted by British actress Eve Best, able to reveal the truth about herself, that she is a virgin, he being the only man to have guessed this.

 Despite their mutual regard and attraction revealed in their horseplay, each is aware that these moments of self-revelation are only transitory.  When the moon wanes at the end of their night together, Jamie will go back to his old ways, returning to the New York stage and his “tarts,” while Josie will continue to slave for her indolent father and hide her vulnerability under brashness. Through the artistry of these two actors, O’Neill’s play achieves its definitive interpretation in this powerful production.