The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage

Plays must not be meant to read. This award-winning trilogy of plays is almost impossible to read, my worst experience with reading since Ivanhoe. All of these plays must be valuable to an audience only if it sees the performance. Tom Stoppard was the author. From one play to the next, I have no recollection of an outstanding act, scene, character, conversation, analogy, vision, or subtext. If I have to remember something from these works it is the presence of Turgenev. It might also be the study of Pushkin. In other words, the connection this play makes to me is only the mention of writers I have enjoyed, so a little bit of a cheap trick. To me, a good play can’t be rapid exchanges. To have written these conversations, Stoppard could have written a novella instead where it is conventional to hide dialogue in the bulk of what is otherwise written, scenery and action and flashbacks, philosophy. A play relies almost entirely on the articulation of unnatural speech, spotlighted speech, but Stoppard basically goes a line and a half at a time. How would characters grow character if not be an emphasis on speech that is more than routine? I am amazed at this trilogy’s capacity to make money. As far as the content, I am turned off by the rich aristocrats advocating for the revolutions. Although inevitable is Dostoevsky too, matchmaking has its limits in what is supposed to be the visual performance of a play. There is Koyla the deaf kid. There is epilepsy. I don’t know if this makes for authentic Russian plot or if these are the plays of a man who has just read his Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Turgenev. There is Herzen and Natasha, Herzen and Natasha. I don’t think I should have to review the dramatis personae every time I need to figure out who they are. I should just be able to read their lines. This is a very tiresome historical travelogue. I thought this would be a book about one place and one time and characters who did not have children. Kids just make all the action about whom to marry.

This play was a big hit in NYC,at Lincoln Center a story of 19 Century Russian intellectuals writers, Turgenyev,et al but it is too long and does not take the time to develop the philosophical and literary ideas that Stoppard did so well in Hapgood(quantum mechanics and the british spy system) Arcadia,( a play that the NY Times Brantley said that when the British do it is the best play ever, and deals with entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, accidently invented by Thomosina Cloverly a 19 Cent teen age artistocrat genius)and The Invention of Love,(the story of the poet A. E Housman, the young poet played brilliantly by Robert Sean Leonard,the doctor buddy of House and hero in Dead Poet's Society) While TCOU play is not bad, it takes about two days to see, with breaks. Andcompared to the "genius" of Stoppard's past work.I could not finish reading it and I love great plays. EAN

I'm a big Tom Stoppard fan but this trilogy of plays took a while to get through. I'm sure it plays better than it reads and a lot of it is pretty funny. But it is hard to keep all the different characters straight and the moving back and forth in time and place can sometimes have you flipping back a page or two to remind yourself where and when you're at. If you're a Stoppard fan or a fan of heady and yet sometimes ridiculous philosophical talk, you'll probably enjoy these plays. Would love to see a good production of this somewhere.

It might come off better to see it staged, but still worth reading.

3 Terrific plays that hold your interest to become larger than the sum of its parts. You feel that you are witnessing something unfolding before your eyes, and sit or imagine (if only reading the play) with awe and wonder. You feel the pain, naivite, illusions, disappointments and wisdom eventually revealed that this majestic piece offers and eventually delivers. Yes, this is the stuff dreams are made of.

Of course this had to come out after I already bought all 3 separately. It's great to have them together though, so you can go back and reference the earlier scenes when you're reading the later ones. I love this play. I got to see all three, and they really blew me away.

These sequential plays - based in part on Isaiah Berlin's famous book, "Russian Thinkers " - are beautifully written and moving.

Great plays.Would love to do the series!