Voyage (Stoppard, Tom. Coast of Utopia, Pt. 1.)

Rating:
Summary: A Strange Ambition
Review: I'm kind of in mourning for Stoppard. He's still far and away the best, most natural writer of dialogue in the English language, and he still clearly possesses a very sharp-witted and perceptive understanding of human nature, and an ability to depict characters in such a way that you can se how even some fairly sophisticated and difficult ideas might have arisen from the distinctive quirks of their individual personalities, and vice versa.

But somewhere between _Indian Ink_ and _The Invention of Love_ he for some unfathomable reason decided that he was going to stop writing plays and start writing three-dimensional, illustrated history textbooks. Why?? It seems like such a misdirection of his abilities. I'm glad that as he ages gracefully, he's able to happily sail off to Byzantium, but I never asked to be taken onto the boat.

Rating:
Summary: The World According to Bakunin
Review: Stoppard's latest work, the Coast of Utopia trilogy, purports to examine the great minds of Russian philosophy who have been forgotten by the west, the men who built up the age of revolutions.

Voyage focuses on the whirlwind that is Michael Bakunin, who will one day become a leading anarchist but who is now just an artillery student who would rather study the new German romantic philosophy with his friends Nicholas Stankevich and Vissarion Belinsky. Stankevich was the founder of the leading philosophical circle in 1830s Moscow, a circle that produced Soviet-beloved literary critic Belinsky and novelist Ivan Turgenev. Revolutionary writer Alexander Herzen makes a breif appearance, but his story is told in the second and third plays.

Voyage is the anomaly of the trilogy. It focuses on the Bakunin family, while the other two plays focus on Herzen. It tends to examine broader trends, while the second two are more personal. The rapidly changing world of philosophy, class conflict, the role of women in society are all examined through more than one character. In structure, the second two plays are far more typical. Voyage, in contrast, has a unique organization. The first act flows chronologically, beginning to end, in one locale -- the family estate of Premukhino. But the family does not spend all of their time at Premukhino. The children often travel to Moscow, and the second act takes place there and in St Petersburg, from beginning to end. Thus the second act fills in narrative gaps from the first, and references in the first are fully explained in the second, resulting in some complex but lovely jokes. At the end, a short epilogue returns the scene to Premukhino, a coda as is used in the other two plays at the ends of acts.

Stoppard's characters are vibrant, but on the page they lose some of the strength they had on stage. It is perhaps less thrilling to read than to have seen, and many of the jokes are visual. Much of Belinsky's odd charm is from his physical tics, and the scenes between Liubov and Stankevich are only effective when read at the right pace, without making light of the necessary pauses. But in any play, something is lost when not properly performed, and Voyage holds up quite well considering those limitations. I cannot rate it five stars because I was lucky enough to see the first preview of the world premiere, and the written text cannot compare to having seen Douglas Henshall, Raymond Coulthard, Will Keen, and Eve Best create such wonderful roles.

Nonetheless, Voyage is eminently readable and highly amusing, and the trilogy is addictive to anyone with an interest in the age of revolutions.

Rating:
Summary: Stoppard's words joined to volatile and fascinating history
Review: Tom Stoppard is arguably the single finest playwright of his generation, and the Coast of Utopia trilogy is a massive undertaking that in the hands of a less skilled author could have gone awry and badly. Stoppard though manages to make what could be a painfully pedantic history lesson into a moving portrayal of love, ideology, loss, and change.

Voyage is my personal favorite of the three, if only because Liubov Bakunin (sister of the anarchist Michael Bakunin) and Nicholas Stankevich (proponent of German philosophy in Russia) are so stunningly written and so absolutely endearing. The Bakunin sisters as a whole are a lovely treat, funny and charming and feminine but still remarkably intelligent and capable, something often missing from period fiction. Michael Bakunin, Nicholas Stankevich, Vissarion Belinksy, Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen, all major historical figures in their own rights, are amazingly human, but manage to retain the spark of greatness that brought them to their success, even cut short as it was in the cases of Stankevich and Belinsky.

The history is neither dominate or secondary to the characterization here, rather Stoppard manages to make the historical events we know (or may not know) part and parcel of the volatile and fascinating lives of some of Russias greatest citizens.