The Coast of Utopia—Part One: Voyage

BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS Hawke, left, and Crudup imagine a better Russia.

Photograph: Paul Kolnik

Vivian Beaumont Theater. By Tom Stoppard. Dir. Jack O’Brien. With ensemble cast.

Throughout Voyage, the first play in Tom Stoppard’s three-part epic about the ideological groundwork for the Russian revolution, 19th-century Russia is likened to many things. Literary critic Belinsky (Billy Crudup) is especially fond of cramming that continental expanse into a neat metaphor: In one scene alone, he despairingly compares his homeland to a costume ball in which everyone comes dressed as a differing nationality, or to a waif whose growth has been stunted by untrusting parents. His best conceit is also infant-based: “Look at us!” Belinsky cries. “A gigantic child with a tiny head stuffed full of idolatry for everything foreign…and a huge inert body abandoned to its own muck.” Apt though this jeremiad is, one can’t help but point out that Voyage is the obverse of Belinski’s image: a giant head stuffed with ideas and facts atop a tiny body that twitches constantly but doesn’t travel very far.

Not that anyone would call 44 actors, 70 roles and eight and a half hours of stage time a small body, but if Voyage is any indication of the trilogy as a whole, The Coast of Utopia will be an antic, talky but not terribly action-packed theatrical event. (Think Lord of the Rings without the awesome battle scenes, the One Ring being the Hegelian dialectic.) Yes, talking and cogitating are acts, but Stoppard’s slightly perverse idea of a chronicle play is to eavesdrop on consumptive intellectuals quibbling over Hegel, Kant, and the disparity between Being and Reality far into the night. Russia, as the great playwright envisions it, is a nation of Hamlets, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. The big idea of this massively ambitious project is the combined pleasure, inadequacy and danger of philosophy; it’s a play about dreamers whose noble ideals led, a century later, to the genocidal horrors of Stalin. The ironic title says it all: utopia is Latin for “nowhere”—and how can nowhere have a coast?

A little advance homework might help; Stoppard condenses so many characters, subplots and worldviews into less than three hours that one needs a scorecard to keep track. The first act of Voyage spans 1833 to 1841 on Premukhino, an Arcadian estate owned by the complacent but commonsensical patriarch Alexander Bakunin (Richard Easton), who boasts of the “500 souls” under his care. Those souls are mostly serfs, played by an ensemble affecting doglike servility around their master. Premukhino is Russia in microcosm: hordes of slaves serving the whims of a cultured minority under the thumb of a conservative tyrant. Alexander’s scion, Michael (Ethan Hawke), is a temperamental philosophical dilettante who scorns his father’s exhortations to stay in the military or take up a profession. Michael’s circle of friends includes fellow high-minded student Stankevich (David Harbour) and the aforementioned Belinski, who yearns for a literature Russia can call its own. Adding romantic complications are Bakunin’s four daughters (whom Stoppard might have characterized more fully), who provide comic respite from the gales of discursive speechifying. Here the playwright adopts an appropriately Chekhovian tone of melancholy hopefulness.

The action shifts to Moscow in Act II, and the clock rewinds to 1834, as we get to know Alexander Herzen (Brían F. O’Byrne) and his associates, agitators who dream of a Russia freed from the czarist yoke. “What is to be done?” Herzen asks semirhetorically, prefiguring the same question Lenin would eventually pose. Herzen crosses paths with Belinksi and Bakunin, and each meeting of minds marks a step further toward radicalism. The literary influence here is primarily Dostoyevskian, with a notable Bulgakovian flourish: the Ginger Cat—a man-size feline in formal dress—who materializes at a fancy-dress ball. (Presumably, we’ll have to wait till the second or third play to find out what it symbolizes.)

Unlike Travesties or Jumpers, Stoppard doesn’t fit this wide-ranging material into a postmodern structure: Voyage is presented as a straightforward episodic narrative (albeit on fast forward). And marvelously sure director Jack O’Brien follows suit, orchestrating this huge work with elegant simplicity on a glossy black rotating stage. Visually, there’s still plenty of attractive costume drama, but O’Brien’s uncluttered, minimalist setting lets Stoppard’s anguished thinkers do what they do best: engage in a ferocious exchange of world-shaking concepts.