Continuing my reading of Tom Stoppard’s works, I chose “Voyage”, the 2002 play which begins the “Coast of Utopia” trilogy.  It’s a radical departure from the comic farces of “Rosenkranz and Guildenstern” and “On the Razzle” as Stoppard begins his deep dive into questions of reality and perception, free will and determinism.  The characteristic Stoppard technique of keeping the place the same while toying with time is evident as the two acts provide different versions of what happened among a  group of people in the Russia of the 1830’s.

The action features the three daughters of the Bakunin family, their brother, Michael, and his associates Stankevich, Belinsky, and Herzen. Romance comes and goes as does the philosophical fashions that inspire the young Russian intellectuals, from Schilling to Kant to Hegel. These young Russians decry the lack of modernity in their country and the absence of great art.  Pushkin and Turgenev make cameo appearances, as if to counter the argument about great art.  Dissidents are exiled or imprisoned; romances come and go; tuberculosis takes its toll.  Alongside all this action, the debates about reality, free will, art, and freedom boil.

I must admit to being a bit at sea with where Stoppard was going in this play. The large cast of characters kept me returning to the list of actors on the opening page in order to keep them straight, and the parallel though different actions in the two acts had me confused from time to time.  Perhaps it will all come clear when I read the remaining two plays of the trilogy.

The enthusiastic review in “New York” magazine in 2006 when the play opened in NYC began as follows: “Coming from any other playwright, the idea behind The Coast of Utopia would sound preposterous; from Tom Stoppard, it’s practically routine. Having made the second law of thermodynamics heartbreaking (Arcadia) and turned logical positivism into farce (Jumpers), he now proposes to dramatize 30 years of the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Russia…. Would someone intent on parodying his style dream up a premise so sprawling, so erudite, so … Stoppardian?”

The reviewer shared some of my issues, writing that “the incompleteness of the story makes responding to it a bit tricky.”, but overall, “Voyage” is more evidence that in Stoppard, we have the best playwright of the last 50 years.  I look forward to reading the next two plays in the trilogy, “Shipwreck” and “Salvage” and getting a fuller appreciation of Stoppard’s epic effort.  The premier performance in NYC twenty years ago featured Ethan Hawke as Michael Bakunin and Billy Crudup as Belinsky and was an 8 hour marathon featuring 44 cast members.  What an achievement!