The Coast of Utopia

Tom Stoppard: The Coast of Utopia. I: Voyage: through May 1. II: Shipwreck: through April 19. III: Salvage: through May 4. Shotgun Players, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, California; 510.841.6500 Marathon production of all three plays: April 26, May 4, 12 noon, 4pm, 8pm.

WE CAN ALL be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin .. if the question is, how do you make a роem Ьу Pushkin?— or, What eхаctly makes one poem or painting or piece of mцsic greater than another?—or, what is beauty? or liberty? or virtue? — if the question is, how should we live? .. . then reason gives no answer or different answers. So something is wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... "

That's Vissarion Belinsky talking, in a characteristically impassioned outburst in the first act of Voyage. He's a literary critic living in poverty in Moscow, way out of his depth, visiting the wealthy, complacent, cultured country estate of the Bakunin family. I have to confess to a great deal of sympathy for poor Bakunin Vissarion; I think I was similarly unsure in my youth. He doesn't know German or even French; he hasn't studied Hegel; he doesn't know how to approach the four beautiful Bakunin girls.

He could be a comic figure in a Chekhov play, but he isn't: this is the first of the three plays making up Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which follows Mikhail Bakunin, then Alexander Herzen, from the dacha to Moscow to Paris and London and finally Geneva, over a span of 35 years from 1833 to 1868, interleaving romance, marital drama, and political philosophy in an engrossing eoght hours of theater.

Among the characters in this fascinating cast: the revolutionaries Bakunin and Herzen; the poet Nicholas Ogarev, the political philosophers Karl Marx and Ernest Jones; the exiled nationalists Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Stanislaw Worcell, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Lajos Kossuth; Turgenev: wives, sisters, and mistresses; serfs and servants. Somehow Stoppard manages to juggle this huge cast, long history, and intricate conflicting and competing world views without bogging down or losing focus.

The plays are published in a handsome slipcased and hardbound edition by Grove Press, and I heartily recommend them as reading material — and especially before seeing the productions currently running in Berkeley. Some have complained, online, about losing interest during the reading; I found the texts gripping. In the theater, the plays, directed by founding Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley, seem perfectly faithful to the letter; and of course fleshed out on stage, spoken through actors in fine costume and rising generally quite to the dramatic pitch Stoppard offers, the plays are more present, more vigorous: but a prior reading helps the viewer negotiate this intricate voyage.

Stoppard's trilogy has two interwoven lines: the domestic and the political lives of his characters, and particularly of Bakunin and Herzen. Bakunin of course was the model of the impetuous 19th-century anarchist; but Herzen — the illegitimate son of a Russian mother and a German father — was the more reasoned, ultimately by far the more pragmatic. The play proceeds through conversation laced with outbursts, like Belinsky's quoted above; and, throughout, through pointed parries between the men and the women, condemned by the assumptions of their time to be as observant, intelligent, and deserving as the men, but less informed and less influential in public life.

The position of the men, endlessly comparing their readings of the great 19th-century German philosophers, is summed up in a wonderful speech given to the radical poet George Herwegh:

…being a stoic  didn't mean a sort of uncomplaining putting uр with misfortune, that's only how it looks оп the outside—inside, it's alI about achieving apathy… which means: a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn't passive, it's the freedom that comes from recoginisirg new borders, a new country called Necessity… it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can't for the moment bе altered ... which реорlе find quite difficult. We've had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it's going to do. … Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that сan't-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it's bucketing down on your picnic.

It isn't easy for an early 21st-century American to imagine the position of these leisured intellectual Russians in the 1840s, after the failure of the Decembrist demonstrations, all too aware of the backward, marginal position of their country in the European context. The Age of Reason had led to the French Revolution, the Divine Right of Monarchy had been questioned, republicanism had taken hold successfully in America but had failed in France; slavery had been abolished in most of Europe but not (yet) in America or Russia. The press was rigidly controlled in Russia; to have any idea of current thought in political or social philosophy one must be able to read English, French, or German and have access to banned publications in those languages. 

On top of all that, there was no literature in Russian — only Pushkin. Women o the upper classes were lucky if they'd managed to learn enough French to read George Sand, who famously taught the dangerous injunction to Follow Your Heart. But if you think all this describes a situation with no relevance to our own time, consider this speech, the Slavophile Akssakov's outburst from Shipwreck:

We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It's not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie, yes, and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation. It can even be our destiny to unite the Slav nations and lead Europe back to the true path. It will be the age of Russia.

Think about those lines the next time you look at Vladimir Putin's unsmiling face on the television news.

Stoppard's trilogy reminds us of the unending confusion of the 19th century, with its successions of revolutions and restorations, its civil wars, the hope of equality foundering between the intellectual shackles of Marxism and the cynical exploitation of the robber barons and railroad magnates, and the eventual plague of anarchism finally reaching its gruesome climax at Sarajevo, which precipitated a war that made the Reign of Terror look like a rehearsal. You come away from these plays reflecting that the excesses of that war, and the second world war, and all the proxy wars that followed, have been diversions, perhaps even diversionary tactics, to distract us from returning to the main problem: achieving a just society based on equality of access and sustainability of economy.

Fortunately, you also come away from these plays refreshed and entertained. They are, among other things, often very funny. The Shotgun production is well cast, on superb actors in the many lead characters; the costuming is splendid; the set modest but ingenious, the lighting and sound cues resourceful and suitable. You can't expect an opportunity to see this trilogy in one day, on an integrated cast, in a comfortable theater, at affordable prices, to return in any near future: it would be a shame to miss it now.

Two Stoppard plays

FOR THE RECORD, whatever the record might be, we saw two plays by Tom Stoppard on Saturday, down in Berkeley. We caught them just in time; I'm sorry to tell you they've closed. Comments are justifiable, though, because one or another or, I hope, both might well be remounted next season: they constitute the first two-thirds of a trilogy, whose closing piece has been promised for next year.

The trilogy is The Coast of Utopia, which, as stated by Wikipedia, focusses on "the philosophical debates in pre-revolution Russa between 1833 and 1866." The trilogy runs nine hours, Wikipedia further states, and I can believe it: the two plays we saw, Voyage and Shipwreck, ran close to three hours each.

My experience with Stoppard is insufficient — not entirely my fault: his plays aren't given sufficient attention by the companies whose productions we visit. We've seen, let's see, Travesties, On the Razzle, Arcadia, maybe The Invention of Love. His translation of The Seagull, too, and of course the movie Shakespeare in Love, whose screenplay he co-wrote (with Marc Norman).

Nor have I read any of his plays. This will distress my reclusive friend in Corvallis, in the unlikely event he reads this: he lent me a copy of The Invention of Love months ago, and I haven't yet got to it.

It was Travesties that put me off Stoppard. I was a dedicated Joycehead for decades, and the idea of fooling around with historical fact, throwing Joyce and Tzara and Lenin together on stage simply because they happened to live for a short time in the same city where they might have met, seemed not only dubious in terms of ethics, but downright shameful. It seemed to my priggish standards an assault on the dignity of Joyce's accomplishments; certainly the dignity of the situations he suffered in those Zurich years.

Of course I've come to realize the absurdity, the ignorance, the uselessness, the short-sightedness of my outrage at Stoppard's "liberties." An outrage facilitated, by the way, by my not having actually read or seen Travesties at the time: it was only a few seasons ago that I first saw it, produced — brilliantly, I thought — by the Shotgun Players.

It was the same theater that brought us Voyage and Shipwreck the other day. They are truly a marvelous company, engaging, resourceful, enterprising. Their little Ashby Stage, a storefront theater with a steeply raked audience seating perhaps a hundred, is obviously limited in terms of facilities, but where other companies wallow in theatrical resources, Shotgun dances cleverly and gracefully in theatrical imaginativeness and enterprise.

I've complained here about certain productions in other theaters, where the urge to make Shakespeare, for example, "relevant" to today's audiences has sometimes resulted in compromises with what seems to me the intent and meaning of the script. The idea seems to be that the audience can't understand the complexity and seriousness of the play unless it's pushed at them in theatrical dress more current. The result is Troilus and Cressida, say, performed like an Iraq War movie. You alter the play to make your audience "understand" it, even though the result is not the play Shakespeare wrote.

What Shotgun did with Stoppard's complex and serious plays was alter the audience, not the scripts. The alteration was simple enough: a member of the company came out onstage a few minutes before curtain and explained a few details, in the course of which aspects of Russian art, philosophy, and society of 180 years ago — not to mention the French Revolution, the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, Marx, George Sand, and a few other items — was easily and gracefully presented.

What a pleasure, to attend a theater whose audience is treated like a collection of intelligent men and women, interested in such things, and capable of following simple declarative sentences! And the printed program, too, was a masterpiece of clarity and precision, dispensing with the usual format and setting instead a timeline of the dramatic content of the two plays, another of the French Revolution, biographies of the characters Stoppard involves in his plays, and synopses of the action.

The plays are meaty, no question. Of the two, Voyage, the first of the trilogy, seemed to me the more fascinating, largely because of its structure. Act I, set on a Chekhov-like country estate near Moscow, presents nine scenes centered on the wealthy Bakunin family, four daughters and a son (Michael) and their parents, guests, and serfs.

Act II moves the action to Moscow and Petersburg, following the same characters (and a few new ones) through the same time period, 1833-1844, backfilling details and motivation and consequences.

The play is "about" the lassitude and hopelessness and uncertainty of the Russia of the period, mired in the serfdom economy, torn between fascination and envy for Europe (especially the freedom of France and the dedication of Germany) and an obstinate loyalty to the antiEuropean qualities of the eternal Mother Russia.

All this is slowly, carefully spooled out through conversation, with a few set pieces at critical junctures. The economy, agriculture, law, religion, literature or the lack of it — those are the subjects, ostensibly: but the real substance of Stoppard's play is the complexity, the inheritance, the philosophical difficulty and the eventual failure of a historical moment, reaching back to the Age of Reason and the French Revolution that followed it, and forward to the long night that would follow the events of this play, seventy more years before the Russian Revolution, then ninety more to our own time, when the Russian failure seems just as surely sealed.

Shipwreck follows Bakunin and his foil the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to Paris, 1846-47. Where the first play introduced literati and liberals as guests of the Bakunin country estate, Bakunin himself is now seen as a guest in the cosmopolitan home of the wealthy Alexander Herzen, half German and half Russian, at home in neither society. In a similar structure, though much more linear in its chronology, Stoppard narrows his focus, drawing the net tighter around his characters, propelling us to the inevitable futility of the 1848 Paris revolution in the first act, then in the second dissolving the tension in the anticlimax of the Herzen household in Nice.

I can hardly wait to see the final play, Salvage. In fact I'll probably have to buy the scripts of all three and read them soon; the production can't come soon enough for me. If Shipwreck was less gripping than Voyage, it was probably because it is after all the centerpiece of the trilogy. The first play stands on its own; the second needs the first and, I'm sure, the third.

I can't say enough about the principles among the cast. Joseph Salazar was deep and changeable as Michael Bakunin; Nick Medina was smoldering and intense and brilliant as Belinsky; Jonah Rotenberg was sometimes meditative, sometimes quick and brittle as Herzen. It's a huge cast, and there were a couple of weaker actors in lesser roles, but for the most part I was persuaded throughout the afternoon and evening.

The director was Patrick Dooley, artistic director of Shotgun. I'm glad he's where he is; intelligent theater needs an intelligent and effective master in a community like Berkeley. But when I think what he might be able to do a few hundred miles north…