Sins of Old Age
Saturday, August 3rd, 2002 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthI found the third part of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy rather less satisfactory - no, make that less enjoyable - than the others, and I'm now wondering if that's because I haven't got there yet.
Salvage follows Herzen into middle age: I hesitate to say old age, since I don't think he's that old, but the death of 'the sainted Natalie' and his beloved son has diminished him. "I've stopped arguing with the world ... I've lost every illusion dear to me!" he cries. "I'm forty!"
He doesn't exactly retreat into himself, what with an affair with his friend Ogarev's wife (also called Natalie, or Natasha - Herzen's circle seems to have the same paucity of names as fandom) and a near-miss with his children's marvellous German governess Malwida. Oh, and he starts up a few more radical newspapers. And keeps open house for the Russian emigre population. And sneers at French socialists. But he's not the vibrant revolutionary of Shipwreck: he has been wrecked, and everything here is a gradual diminishment.
Bakunin returns from ten years in Siberian exile. He is older but no wiser. "You incubate the germ of a great idea for which there is no demand," says Herzen in typically melancholy mode. He's given up on the idea of a great Russian revolution (of course, he is rather ahead of his time on that: and I do wonder if it might have gone better if the serfs had revolted while they were still serfs, rather than sixty-odd years later when they'd been emancipated, made to pay rent, and had another generation or two of grievance against the landowners).
In this episode, more is made of the contradiction inherent in his radical philosophy: Herzen is born wealthy, he's a member of the aristocracy. As some unwashed English revolutionary says to him, "For people like me it's not about compromising our social position: it's about our social position."
I'm not sure where, how, this ended. I was there but there was a sense of fizzling out, of compromise, of repetition. I felt if they'd all been given another twenty years of life, they'd have gone the same rounds again, with variations.
Of course, there are the children: Herzen's son and daughter by his dead wife are young adults by the end of this play, but they don't seem likely to repeat the cycle. Tata has forgotten how to speak Russian: Sasha has married a member of the proletariat (a non-speaking role). Maybe that's the moral of this final part of the triptych: things drift, and change, and are forgotten.
There's a terrible wistfulness about Herzen, though: a touching vulnerability. He speaks, late in the play, of the 'summer lightning of personal happiness': there's a sense of the inexorable march of fate when he says, "It takes wit and courage to make our way in the world when our way is making us." And yet, he doesn't stop. His friends die: he has a single glove as memento of his dead, deaf son. He doesn't stop.
Look out for some thoughts on the trilogy as a whole. Coming Real Soon Now, i.e. this month, probably.
Salvage follows Herzen into middle age: I hesitate to say old age, since I don't think he's that old, but the death of 'the sainted Natalie' and his beloved son has diminished him. "I've stopped arguing with the world ... I've lost every illusion dear to me!" he cries. "I'm forty!"
He doesn't exactly retreat into himself, what with an affair with his friend Ogarev's wife (also called Natalie, or Natasha - Herzen's circle seems to have the same paucity of names as fandom) and a near-miss with his children's marvellous German governess Malwida. Oh, and he starts up a few more radical newspapers. And keeps open house for the Russian emigre population. And sneers at French socialists. But he's not the vibrant revolutionary of Shipwreck: he has been wrecked, and everything here is a gradual diminishment.
Bakunin returns from ten years in Siberian exile. He is older but no wiser. "You incubate the germ of a great idea for which there is no demand," says Herzen in typically melancholy mode. He's given up on the idea of a great Russian revolution (of course, he is rather ahead of his time on that: and I do wonder if it might have gone better if the serfs had revolted while they were still serfs, rather than sixty-odd years later when they'd been emancipated, made to pay rent, and had another generation or two of grievance against the landowners).
In this episode, more is made of the contradiction inherent in his radical philosophy: Herzen is born wealthy, he's a member of the aristocracy. As some unwashed English revolutionary says to him, "For people like me it's not about compromising our social position: it's about our social position."
I'm not sure where, how, this ended. I was there but there was a sense of fizzling out, of compromise, of repetition. I felt if they'd all been given another twenty years of life, they'd have gone the same rounds again, with variations.
Of course, there are the children: Herzen's son and daughter by his dead wife are young adults by the end of this play, but they don't seem likely to repeat the cycle. Tata has forgotten how to speak Russian: Sasha has married a member of the proletariat (a non-speaking role). Maybe that's the moral of this final part of the triptych: things drift, and change, and are forgotten.
There's a terrible wistfulness about Herzen, though: a touching vulnerability. He speaks, late in the play, of the 'summer lightning of personal happiness': there's a sense of the inexorable march of fate when he says, "It takes wit and courage to make our way in the world when our way is making us." And yet, he doesn't stop. His friends die: he has a single glove as memento of his dead, deaf son. He doesn't stop.
Look out for some thoughts on the trilogy as a whole. Coming Real Soon Now, i.e. this month, probably.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Sunday, August 4th, 2002 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, August 5th, 2002 07:12 am (UTC)Re Stoppard, you may find this Observer piece (http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,726099,00.html) interesting.
I'd certainly recommend the trilogy, though perhaps not all in a single week. The acting's good, the wit is, well, Stoppardian, and the staging is overwhelming (at one point I felt sea-sick!)