The Coast of Utopia part II - Shipwreck at Lincoln Center - Review

December 22, 2006
THEATER REVIEW 'THE COAST OF UTOPIA: PART TWO - SHIPWRECK'
History’s Sweep, in Words and Silence
By BEN BRANTLEY
Tom Stoppard, a grand master of galloping conversation, knows when it’s time to shut up. The sumptuous Lincoln Center production of “Shipwreck,” the second part of Mr. Stoppard’s absorbing “Coast of Utopia” trilogy about Russian idealists errant in the 19th century, is filled with coups de théâtre.
There’s that magical materializing of the Place de la Concorde in Paris; the animated forest that suggests Birnam Wood is advancing on Moscow; tableaux vivants of Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” and Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” and, as always with Mr. Stoppard, dialogue that opens into startling splendor like a peacock preening its tail.
But the most stunning moment of all arrives when Mr. Stoppard simply pulls the plug on the dense talk that has been buzzing from the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where “Shipwreck” opened last night, and asks us to experience a world hitherto defined, above all, by words through the perspective of a deaf child.
It’s not exactly that the passionate debating, which has been going on with scarcely a pause through the first half of the first act, comes to a complete stop. That would be asking too much of the play’s logorrheic characters, who are never happier than when they are arguing about lofty subjects. They continue to work their mouths and gesticulate madly.
But we don’t hear them. The focus of attention in the scene — set in the lavishly appointed Paris salon of the Russian exile Alexander Herzen (Brian F. O’Byrne) and his wife, Natalie (Jennifer Ehle) in 1847 — shifts to their small son, Kolya (August Gladstone), who is playing with a top at the edge of the stage, his back to the throng of chattering adults. Deaf since birth, Kolya is aware only of the spinning top and the ominous vibrations of thunder.
That’s Mr. Stoppard’s sublimely theatrical way of admitting that words, his beloved stock in trade, ultimately don’t count for much in the course of human events. Many of his characters come to the same conclusion in “Shipwreck,” which is directed by Jack O’Brien with the same seductive vividness he brought to the trilogy’s first part, “Voyage,” which opened last month.
Being Stoppard characters, these high-thinking men and women manage to say, frequently and with remarkable verbal eloquence, that verbal eloquence is empty.
When momentous events happen in “Shipwreck,” whether national revolutions or personal betrayals, it’s not because a blueprint has been laid out in a book by Hegel, Marx or George Sand. “The names of things don’t come first,” says one character — Ivan Turgenev (Jason Butler Harner), as it happens. “Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.” History, Herzen later observes ruefully, “isn’t impressed by intellectuals.”
It is Mr. Stoppard’s acknowledgment of this principle, and Mr. O’Brien’s realization of it with his warmblooded cast and expert design team, that makes “The Coast of Utopia” so improbably entertaining. The thunderous vibrations that Kolya senses are the tremors of life asserting itself against those who would try to control it.
Those tremors never cease in the whirligig world of “Shipwreck,” which finds many of the restless youths introduced on Russian soil in “Voyage” — writers and ideologues and their wives and lovers — moving into adulthood in continental Europe. Adulthood does not mean stability.
Bakunin (Ethan Hawke), the aristocrat anarchist, is as prone to adolescent extremes as ever, the difference being that while once he merely talked about insurrection, now he actively agitates for it. Belinsky (Billy Crudup), the ferocious literary critic, is still mesmerizingly uncomfortable in his skin. And the rhythm of interaction among all the characters remains much the same: a speedy cycle of fiery conflicts and teary reconciliations.
In “Shipwreck,” though, the stakes are higher, both private and public. Abstractions are made flesh, as revolution is experienced first hand, in France and Germany, and the gospel of free love is put into practice. The consequences, especially for Herzen and Natalie and their circle of intimates, are shattering, at least for a while. The world continues to turn, and Herzen comes to believe that “life’s bounty is in its flow.” The same might be said of this production.
Far more than in “Voyage,” a single character dominates “Shipwreck.” That’s Herzen, a writer and solidly reflective figure amid the flux. Like that of many Stoppard heroes, his role is more reactive than active. Yet Mr. O’Byrne, one of Broadway’s finest actors (“Frozen,” “Doubt,” “Shining City”), never seems boringly passive. He makes Herzen’s philosophical evolution as much a matter of feeling as of thought.
He is well matched in Ms. Ehle, who brings to the terminally romantic Natalie the same emotional transparency that illuminated her Tony-winning performance in the Broadway revival of Mr. Stoppard’s “Real Thing.” Together they provide a sobering emotional center that is necessary to “Shipwreck.”
Ms. Ehle appeared in “Voyage” as the anxious, tubercular Liubov. One of the special pleasures of seeing all of “Utopia” (“Salvage,” the third and final installment, opens in February) is the chance it affords to watch actors reinvent themselves in different parts or expand in continuing ones. Mr. Harner, as Turgenev, and Josh Hamilton, as the poet Ogarev, come into their own here, with seamless characterizations that were only hinted at in “Voyage.”
David Harbour, a shy, consumptive philosopher in “Voyage,” delivers a delicious comic turn as Herwegh, a German poet who prides himself on his sexual seductiveness and literary idleness. (“Pushkin wrote far too much,” he says complacently.) As his wife Bianca Amato sharply and affectingly registers the toll of living with such a man.
The production’s tastiest surprise, though, is Amy Irving, last seen as a stolid matriarch in “Voyage,” who here shows up as Ogarev’s estranged wife, Maria, a free-living artist’s muse and model in Paris. Ms. Irving plays the role with a jaded but overpowering sensuality that gives the lie to the romantic idealism of Ms. Ehle’s Natalie.
Mr. Stoppard is always pulling the rug out from under the idealistic aspirations and postures in “Utopia,” including those of a playwright who dares to paint on such a broad historical canvas. Words, words, words are irresistible to Mr. Stoppard. And like his characters he probably uses too many of them, making the same point a few times too many, or parading in-joke cleverness for its own sake.
More notable for the velocity than for the depth of his thought, Mr. Stoppard isn’t delivering any intellectual aperçus here that couldn’t be picked up in a good university seminar about 19th-century Russian novelists. It’s the collision of thought with feeling, of tidy intellect with the chaos of life, that generates such blazing theatrical heat.