Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia: You Had to Be There

(reflections on THE COAST OF UTOPIA, comprising three full-length plays VOYAGE, SHIPWRECK, and SALVAGE, by Tom Stoppard)

Maybe if I had seen all three of these plays last month when they could be viewed over a single weekend in New York, I'd associate the names of all these characters with faces of the actors who played them, and some characters and some episodes would stand out. But I've only read them, and I'm unable to recall any action or words by any character in any situation (not counting one that was described in a review that I read).

In fact, after reading them, I can't say more than what I knew from reading reviews. The play more or less follows Russian radical Alexander Herzen and his friends and family over several decades during which his efforts to hasten the liberalization of Russia (mostly articles in journals) become relics and they themselves are derided: "We have left you far behind, and you refuse to notice. ...You're a poet, a storyteller, an orator, anything you please, but you're not a political leader or thinker" (Salvage 110). This image echoes earlier verbal images, and it relates to off-scene events in the trilogy, most memorably the shipwreck in which Herzen's estranged wife and beloved deaf son perished. I appreciate that, but it's not enough to pull these hundreds of pages together for me.

Maybe that's Stoppard's intended effect. Minutes from the end of the whole trilogy, Herzen says, "But history has no culmination! There is no libretto." So, Stoppard has fashioned a very long drama that constantly looks forward to an event that never happens. Herzen in old age, has learned, "A distant end is not an end but a trap." There is no coast. There is no Utopia. Anyone who believes in a Utopia must impose it on the rest of us with tyranny as oppressive and dumb as the czars'.

All the talk of Russian politics and Western culture is played against a background of family life. There are sibling affections and disappointments in marriages in VOYAGE; the loving tutor Matwilda and the sorrow and guilt over the wife and deaf son in SHIPWRECK; reunions of old friends in SALVAGE. Stoppard layers these in every scene, and that's another point: the family, the loves, the kindnesses and taking care of each other are in the end more important than all the writing and debating.

Grasping for a way to comprehend it all, I find an analogy to CANDIDE. Herzen and friends view the world, and find that it never conforms to their worldview. In the end, they realize that they should stay home and make their gardens grow. It's a good thought. But Voltaire expressed it in ninety pages.

I enjoyed many incongruities in the dialogue (when the personal and the political are juxtaposed humorously). I'd like to see it and compare the experience of reading it. But I'm relieved that I didn't slam down $1500 for that weekend in New York.