#1
Posted: 2/18/07 at 8:02pm
Talkin' Broadway is a rave:
The writer remains mightier than the rapier in Salvage, the third and final chapter in Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. But unlike in the previous two installments, Voyage and Shipwreck, this time it’s a much closer call. Now that the gleaming-eyed revolutionists of mid-19th-century Russia have grown up and moved away from their homeland, they’re finally beginning to understand what might have always been implicit in their quest to liberate themselves and others: Sometimes a quill is best filled with blood.
Stoppard himself seems to have absorbed that message as well, as Salvage is the third of The Coast of Utopia that pulses most readily with desires, loss, and regret. From irresistible sexual urges to the desire to incite, inform, and make a difference in a world that deems that nearly impossible, Salvage sweeps through the spectrum of human emotions and experiences with the same gentle violence of a wave crashing against the beach, and is awash in sights, sounds, and sensations that are every bit as soothing. Seldom have giants seemed more recognizably on our scale.
That might just be the single finest achievement of both Stoppard and his director, Jack O’Brien, who have now conclusively proved that, in the theatre at least, living people are not necessarily lost in the tidal ebbs and flows of time. If Stoppard argues something fairly different in the plays themselves, that’s incidental - in The Coast of Utopia, however senseless disappearances may seem, they are never truly without reason. An examination of those reasons and their related repercussions is the overriding theme of Salvage during the 15 years (from 1853 to 186
it documents.
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/UtopiaSalvage.html
The writer remains mightier than the rapier in Salvage, the third and final chapter in Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. But unlike in the previous two installments, Voyage and Shipwreck, this time it’s a much closer call. Now that the gleaming-eyed revolutionists of mid-19th-century Russia have grown up and moved away from their homeland, they’re finally beginning to understand what might have always been implicit in their quest to liberate themselves and others: Sometimes a quill is best filled with blood.
Stoppard himself seems to have absorbed that message as well, as Salvage is the third of The Coast of Utopia that pulses most readily with desires, loss, and regret. From irresistible sexual urges to the desire to incite, inform, and make a difference in a world that deems that nearly impossible, Salvage sweeps through the spectrum of human emotions and experiences with the same gentle violence of a wave crashing against the beach, and is awash in sights, sounds, and sensations that are every bit as soothing. Seldom have giants seemed more recognizably on our scale.
That might just be the single finest achievement of both Stoppard and his director, Jack O’Brien, who have now conclusively proved that, in the theatre at least, living people are not necessarily lost in the tidal ebbs and flows of time. If Stoppard argues something fairly different in the plays themselves, that’s incidental - in The Coast of Utopia, however senseless disappearances may seem, they are never truly without reason. An examination of those reasons and their related repercussions is the overriding theme of Salvage during the 15 years (from 1853 to 186
it documents.http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/UtopiaSalvage.html
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
