Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck Reviews

Talkin Broadway is Positive:

"When last we left our intrepid voyagers drifting through the stormy, scintillating seas of The Coast of Utopia, it seemed they were youths becoming adults, unseasoned young men headed from obscurity to fame, even Russians setting off for Paris. But now that Shipwreck, Part Two of Tom Stoppard's monumental trilogy, has opened at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, we can see just how right and wrong we were. They were sailing in all those directions, and may yet arrive at them, but it's now clear they were destined first to pass through a love story.

Granted, that tale is more Bermuda Triangle than Niagara Falls, but the heat and the heart are there just the same. How can this be? Why would Stoppard apply the brakes to the speeding automobile represented by the trilogy's first installment, Voyage, just when things started getting good? He hasn't. He's instead slammed on the gas, setting things hurtling forward faster than ever. It just so happens that the scenery gracing this leg of journey is of the distinctly human variety. And if anything, it's an even more dazzling sight than Voyage.

When this sprawling epic is viewed at point-blank range - as Stoppard does almost exclusively here - the broader picture emerges with even greater clarity. Whereas Voyage at times felt like a survey of great 19th century Russian thinkers and their timeless thoughts, Shipwreck spends the time necessary to explore them and their relationships in more exacting detail. The result is that you come to understand and even care about the revolutions (internal and external) on which the trilogy, like their lives, is constructed.

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The spell Stoppard and his co-wizard, director Jack O'Brien, have woven this time around is even more mesmerizing, with an increased urgency, emotional potency, and pervasive richness surpassing that of the affecting Voyage. Nothing - including the dreamlike sets by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask; Catherine Zuber's rippling costumes; Kenneth Posner's piercing lighting; and all the supporting performances, especially from the likes of Martha Plimpton as Natalie's friend, Patricia Conolly as Herzen's mother, and Jason Butler Harner as Ivan Turgenev - feels lacking, and the evolution of all these individual elements into a single sweeping landscape is a grand experience unrivaled in most other Broadway plays this year."

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/UtopiaShipwreck.html

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Nice that the opening of a Stoppard play holds this board in such rapt attention.

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Ok...I need to see some good pictures of the set.

Akiva

I saw Shipwreck last week, but I didn't really care for it. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it on a Friday night after a long week. I really enjoyed Voyage...Shipwreck, not so much. I am still looking forward to Salvange and seeing how all of this ends, though not with the same excitement I had leaving the Beaumont in October.

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Amy Irving's performance in "Shipwreck" is indeed sublime.

I'm seeing it tomorrow - well, technically, tonight - and am so looking forward. From reading them, I think this is the most interesting of the three.

Variety is Positive:

"All head, no heart is a common criticism of Tom Stoppard's work. But the most unexpected and enriching surprise of "Shipwreck," the second part of the playwright's epic trilogy "The Coast of Utopia," is that its intellectual vigor is equaled, perhaps even surpassed by its enormous emotional vitality. Jack O'Brien's mesmerizing production of part one, "Voyage," was a dazzling theatrical achievement. In this Euro-trotting second chapter, the political and personal passions of the play's dreamy-eyed 19th-century Russian revolutionaries ripen with age and experience, making it arguably even better.

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This is a play of exile driven by the roller coaster of political hope and failure, and the philosophical discourse is perhaps more fully integrated into the dramatic fiber than in "Voyage." But it's Stoppard's ruminative exploration of messy, hurtful human relationships in act two that makes "Shipwreck" resonate so powerfully. The playwright makes Natalie such a formidable and passionate character, pursuing an ideal of love as elusive as the utopia her husband seeks, that when tragedy strikes directly at her heart, it's devastating.

In a play that shuffles chronology and includes scenes of simultaneous overlapping action, O'Brien shifts with masterful clarity between naturalistic presentation and stylized interludes from the imagination, between somberness and subtle humor with a deftly measured touch. Under the director's unfaltering command, the characters surge to the foreground and then recede gracefully to the margins with the majestic ebb and flow of great literature."



http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932354.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

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Updated On: 12/22/06 at 01:41 AM

What a delicious pun.

AHAHAHA. oh Theatermania. you slay me.

I see Voyage soon! I'm so excited, it should be illegal

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NY Sun is Mixed:

"Mr. Stoppard spends down some of the considerable theatrical capital he accumulated with "Voyage," the trilogy's masterful first entry. Too many arguments among Herzen and his philosophical brethren devolve into comic squabbles, and Mr. Stoppard falls prey to some uncharacteristically lumpy exposition: "Something's wrong this year," complains Herzen's wife, Natalie (Jennifer Ehle), "even though it's all the same people who were so happy together when we took the house last summer."

And Jack O'Brien's staging, so crisp in "Voyage," overcompensates here with a glut of visual pictures that are ravishing but of questionable import. Particularly in the first hour of "Shipwreck," the trilogy's projected ninehour running time feels less like a promise and more like a threat.

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This mania for emotional and logistical equilibrium offers an insightful glimpse into Mr. O'Byrne's performance, which somehow manages to be both compelling and bland. His Herzen is aflame with revolutionary conviction but resolutely placid in his personal dealings; his determination to comprehend the deepest tragedies from a purely philosophical stance can be maddening on an emotional level, but I believe it is appropriate both to the character and to Mr. Stoppard's wintry tone. Mr. O'Byrne is well matched in this regard by the ravishing Ms. Ehle, who nails the confusion and sensual hunger of Herzen's adored but unfulfilled wife.

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"Life's beauty is in its flow," Herzen maintains when this tragedy finally strikes. "Later is too late." By this point, Mr. Stoppard has settled back into the flow of his epic, putting into motion a series of events that promise a formidable conclusion. Despite the predictable and, well, superfluous stretches in "Shipwreck," later can't come soon enough."


http://www.nysun.com/article/45645

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NY Daily News is Positive:

""Shipwreck," which opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont, covers six years, beginning in 1846, and concentrates on writer Alexander Herzen (Brían F. O'Byrne) and his family. The tight focus makes for an accessible and engaging ride, as does the fact that love is as much a part of the story as philosophy and politics. After 12 years of being unable to leave Russia, Herzen and his wife, Natalie (Jennifer Ehle), are allowed go abroad for the sake of their deaf son, Kolya.

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The dynamic O'Byrne infuses Herzen with a potent mix of passion, eloquence and humanity. Ehle, as his wife, simmers with sensuality and intelligence. Hawke, Harner, Crudup and Josh Hamilton, who appears briefly as poet Nicholas Ogarev, use the full force of their magnetism. Amy Irving, as Maria Ogarev, and newcomer Bianca Amato, as Emma Herwegh, are vivid as wives - one estranged, one devoted.

The star of the show is the production itself. Director Jack O'Brien and his designers have made Stoppard's heady and sometimes windy drama a tour de force that is rich with unforgettable images: the Place de la Concorde before, during and after a revolt; a grand chandelier in a Paris flat that glows with excess; leafy trees quivering in unison, as if forecasting a storm.

On "Utopia's" glossy, jet-black stage, under Kenneth Posner's spellbinding lighting, images pop with astounding clarity. It struck me: I'm used to HDTV. O'Brien and company have crafted high-definition theater."



http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/482132p-405803c.html

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Bythesword, I also didn't care for Ehle at all. I thought she was way over the top, but figured it was just me. I read several pretty ravey reviews of her performance on talkinbroadway (particularly the big confrontation scene with O'Byrne, which I thought was kind of a screachy mess...and not in a good way).

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