BY ELI EPSTEIN-DEUTCH

In print | January 25, 2007

“Coast of Utopia,” a trilogy of plays opening this month at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, is an opportunity for the liberal intelligentsia of present-day America, frustrated by a government that they consider vulgar and reactionary, to check out the life and times of another set of intelligentsia who harbored some of the same complaints. The play’s subject is the rebel elite of mid-19th-century Russia — a small, tight-knit group of privileged and literate thinkers who despised the backwardness, authoritarianism and barbaric inequality of their Czarist homeland. Caught in the tight space between the greedy and shallowly patriotic nobility on the one hand, and the great mass of oppressed, ignorant and dimly miserable serfs on the other, they aped the culture of the “enlightened” West as best they could — particularly that of Paris, the romantic, libertine Mecca of poetry and progress.

The Idealist philosophies of Fichte, Kant and Hegel were the rage in Europe, and the educated among these Russians, starved by their repressive regime of all but the most ascetic intellectual diet, seized upon even the most numinous Hegelian abstractions with a passion, invoking literally such concepts as “the self-transcendence of the spirit” during everyday discussions of love, food and sex. The most daring among them trafficked in the published word and tried to sneak satirical themes past the watchful but frequently obtuse censors of the Third Department. All but the most despairing of them imagined that some great change was on the horizon.

The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose breakout hit “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” spun Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” into a self-referential, solipsistic labyrinth of gallows humor, has woven the conflicts, romances and manias of the era’s most significant personalities into a nine-hour work, produced in three parts. I saw the first installment, “Voyage.” “Shipwreck” and “Salvage” are arriving soon. The New York Times published a suggested reading list for prospective audience members to aid their comprehension of "Coast"’s complicated web of characters and historical references. This likely turned some people off, but for others it added to the highbrow appeal of the whole thing. Stoppard wrote a furious letter to the Times denying that viewing his play required academic preparation of any kind.

I was still sufficiently intrigued by the Times article to have a look at the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s “Russian Thinkers,” a book of essays delving into the ideas and influence of Michael Bakunin, Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, the central figures that appear in the “Coast” trilogy. I began to understand why Stoppard might have been annoyed by the background reading recommendation. Compared to a talented and sophisticated historian like Berlin, Stoppard’s portraits of his historical subjects seem somehow juvenile or caricatured. Bakunin and Belinsky, who dominate “Voyage,” saturate their chatty political repartee with endless German metaphysics, which Stoppard has so little interest in that he can only render it mockingly as dialogue. It is a perfectly understandable impulse to want to ridicule a debate that essentially amounts to questioning the reality of reality and Stoppard does score plenty of good-natured points at his characters’ expense. At one point somebody, probably Bakunin, remarks on the illusory nature of his material self as compared to the inner life of his spirit, and then reaches prematurely for a plate of dinner food, declaring, “I’m starving!” This basic joke is presented over and over in different guises though Stoppard each time conceives it cleverly enough that it almost seems fresh.

The problem is that in his glibness Stoppard fails to evoke the impression that the concepts arriving from the West could be the catalyst for some semi-miraculous upheaval in the Russian way of life. Similarly, he does not manage to link the prevailing intellectual spirit convincingly to the inner struggles and dilemmas of his characters — what should be the crucial dramatic element. As Berlin’s essays illustrate so well, the exhilaration and the turmoil that gripped the “Russian thinkers” during their rising years was thanks to the sense that philosophical questions they debated were the potential source of their ruin or salvation. In Stoppard’s play, the characters are constantly running around in excitement, or paralyzed by anguish, but it is hard to tell why. As a result, the stage somehow remains two-dimensional; one cannot truly experience these exciting and dangerous times. “Voyage” thus sacrifices the chance to introduce grand epochal suspense, a major shortcoming for the first chapter in a multi-part epic of ideas. A rare glimmer of prophecy perhaps shines through during Belinsky’s heartfelt speech on the potential and duty of Russian novelists to salvage their country’s soul, but it fades quickly fades behind a clutter of Belinksy’s shrill pontification and Bakunin’s buffoonish, continually self-contradicting sophistry. On such pseudo-intellectually crowded turf, Stoppard himself cannot hope to squeeze through an idea or message of his own.

The first segment of “Coast of Utopia” may be imperfect and fundamentally unsatisfying, but it is still enjoyable to watch from start to finish. Stoppard’s renowned gift for wordplay has retained its polished sheen, even if there is little underneath. Ethan Hawke sustains the script’s energy in the role of Bakunin, who swaggers around radiating the self-assurance and petulance of youth on an exciting adventure whose birthright it is to disdain everything quotidian and tedious. But in the end, “Voyage” is an event worth remembering not for its acting or writing, and certainly not for what it has to say about philosophy or 19th century Russia. It is the flair for visual spectacle with which it is presented. As the curtains open, smoke billows silently out over the stage in the form of a great wave, promising stirring escapades to come. A third of the way through Stoppard’s vision, they have not yet materialized. What is strangely stirring, however, is the forgotten army of serfs, who appear as a tattered, motionless crowd in the background, eerily faceless — the other silent audience to the blithe chatter of the characters.

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