Tom Stoppard's ‘Utopia’ Is a Bore. There, I Said It.
THE question was straightforward, but it was voiced in a tone fraught with frustration, even desperation. It sounded more like a cry for help: “Are you understanding it?”
It emerged from a woman in her 60s, or perhaps a little older, who was slowly making her way across the Lincoln Center plaza, leaning heavily on a walker, as evening fell after a matinee performance of the second installment of Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.
She called it out, apparently to me and my companion as we moved past her, but perhaps more generally to the world at large. With a friendly laugh I allowed that I thought I was getting most of it. This seemed only to darken her mood.
Clearly Mr. Stoppard’s expansive panorama of 19th-century Russian philosophy and history has left at least one customer unsatisfied, or at least bewildered. This might come as a surprise if you’ve read the almost unalloyed praise that has been heaped upon this ambitious three-part opus, which has become a sort of cultural juggernaut and the season’s indispensable ticket for those who consider themselves serious theatergoers. But if that bewildered woman had asked me one or two corollary questions, namely “Are you enjoying it?” or “Do you think it’s a great play?,” my answers would have been “not so much” and “no.”...
Read entire article at Charles Isherwood in the NYT
It emerged from a woman in her 60s, or perhaps a little older, who was slowly making her way across the Lincoln Center plaza, leaning heavily on a walker, as evening fell after a matinee performance of the second installment of Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.
She called it out, apparently to me and my companion as we moved past her, but perhaps more generally to the world at large. With a friendly laugh I allowed that I thought I was getting most of it. This seemed only to darken her mood.
Clearly Mr. Stoppard’s expansive panorama of 19th-century Russian philosophy and history has left at least one customer unsatisfied, or at least bewildered. This might come as a surprise if you’ve read the almost unalloyed praise that has been heaped upon this ambitious three-part opus, which has become a sort of cultural juggernaut and the season’s indispensable ticket for those who consider themselves serious theatergoers. But if that bewildered woman had asked me one or two corollary questions, namely “Are you enjoying it?” or “Do you think it’s a great play?,” my answers would have been “not so much” and “no.”...