May 2019: The Coast of Utopia Trilogy: Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage by Tom Stoppard

2002, Faber and Faber, 336 pages. Written in English, read in English.

Plays are tricky. They’re not made to be read as such. The only people who are made to ready plays, and therefore are more fluent than laypeople reading them, are dramaturgists, directors and actors. For anyone else — like me — a play is simply a book with very little description, and a lot of dialog, in which case the individual sentences’ originators are strictly indicated.

Reading a play very likely loses a lot of its glory and its benefit — you can’t really read the pathos, or the irony, or the wonderful Tony winning performances, inside a set of dry sentences written on paper. Even if there are instructions by the playwright to handle the dialog in a certain way, different actors will have different interpretations, and I — not an actor — would probably not have any.

Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy is a set of three plays — self standing, according to the playwright’s, but part of the same trilogy at least in theme and shared characters — originally staged within a period of two weeks in the National Theatre in London. All three plays deal with the precursors of the Russian revolution — their protagonists are well known figures in the history of the early revolution, like Herzen, Turgenev, Bakunin, even Karl Marx.

As would appear normal in a play, most of what the characters do is talk — share dialogs, spend time in lengthy and important monologues — but within all of the discussions pertaining to the planned revolution, real life occurs. People marry and drift apart, people die, babies are born, families change, and at the end, the private life of the characters mix in with their work and their strife for a newer generation to emerge and carry forward their struggle.

(The book (in a different edition than I’ve read) can be found here.)