| An English playwright became interested in Russian rebels More than a thousand people gathered at London's National Theater last weekend for the premiere of Tom Stoppard's new play. The play is called “The Coast of Utopia”. The performance based on it lasted nine hours, and if you count intermissions - twelve. In the finale, tired but satisfied spectators gave the participants a real ovation. To be completely precise, “The Shore of Utopia” is not one, but a whole series of plays telling how Russian radicals of the 19th century fought for political freedom. Among the characters you can find Mikhail Bakunin and the less radical Ivan Turgenev and Vissarion Belinsky. The main plot revolves around Alexander Herzen, whom the British press dubbed "the first self-proclaimed socialist of Russian history."
Czech-born Tom Stoppard is one of the most brilliant intellectual playwrights on the modern European stage. He is extremely prolific and incredibly popular. Russian audiences know him mainly as the author of the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, an ironic paraphrase of Shakespeare's Hamlet, on which Stoppard also made his own film. Not long ago, his script was used to make the film “Shakespeare in Love” with John Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow. The story Stoppard invented had such a remote relationship to the life of the Great Bard and his contemporaries - from Christopher Marlowe to John Webster - that only a wooden purist from science would dare to reproach the inventive writer for historical inaccuracy. It is possible that the events of the last dramatic opus have an equally distant relationship with Russian history. However, if it is twisted at the same level as Shakespeare in Love, the public (not only the English) will clearly be pleased. Ignat BEZZUBOV |
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