Word: utopia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Have you ever traveled 6,000 miles to attend a single cultural event? I did, last month. The event was "The Coast of Utopia," a trilogy of Tom Stoppard plays directed by Trevor Nunn for the National Theatre in London. With a running (or ambling) time of 9hrs.30min, a cast of 30 adults and 15 children, and an elaborate physical production, "The Coast of Utopia" was unlikely to be mounted anywhere else. I had to be there...
...Coast of Utopia" was part of a trifecta of new works by top English playwrights. London this fall also has on offer "A Number" by Caryl Churchill - of "Cloud Nine" and "Top Girls" glory -and David Hare's "The Breath of Life," a star vehicle for Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. (Would you import the Irishman Brian Friel to join this exalted company? I wouldn't, quite, but Friel had a new piece too: "Afterplay," a slight memory-play with old charmers John Hurt and Penelope Wilton as characters from Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" and "Three Sisters...
...Blanche's seductiveness in her musical voice, the practiced irony of her inflections, the remembered gentilities of a Southern belle long since cracked, her light-footed stroll through the huge, moving set in Nunn's sumptuous, pristine production (in the auditorium next to the one holding "The Coast of Utopia" at the National). Nunn is to stage-direction what Sinatra was to lyric-singing: He's a great reader, finding the undertone in every phrase and pause in the text, and translating that understanding into space, time and gesture. Because Essie Davis impresses more as Blanche's sister Stella than...
...early word on "The Coast of Utopia" was daunting: a nine-hour political debate, freely adapted from Isaiah Berlin's book of essay on "Russian Thinkers." Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Chaadaev, Nicholas Ogarev: discuss their theories of social progress. Anyone? Anyone? Before seeing the plays I boned up on 19th century Russian radicals by reading the fact-packed 88-page program; by the time the lights went down Saturday morning, I felt ready to be a contestant on "Masterminds." Only with Stoppard does the theatergoer have to cram for a show...
...first words of the first play - "Speaking of which..." - cue "The Coast of Utopia" as part of an ongoing debate, passionate and civilized and open to irrelevancies. The trilogy celebrates the fine art of talking: rhetoric, invective, verbal violence and flirtation, impromptu essays that generate heat and light. Much of modernist art, and nearly all of popular culture, is suspicious of articulation. Modernism says that art and passion are precisely those things that can't be put into words; that the roiling impulses that rule are lives are either ineffable or just F---able. But the history of theater...