re-play
I have more posts brewing, but thought I might turn some of you on to a "golden oldie." The "big theatrical event" of the New York theater scene this season (at least for New York's most affluent theater goers), is Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia" trilogy. I haven't seen the Lincoln Center Production and don't plan to (at $100 a ticket for each play, it's quite an investment!).
I did, however, catch the original National Theatre production in London back in 2002 and weighed in on it at some length back then. From the sound of it, the New York production is better directed and the script has been considerably revised, but I suspect that my musings on it remain relevant even to this new production.
Stoppard, one of the favorite dramatists of my youth (I directed him in both high school and college), doesn't make it into my top-ten list anymore and the 2002 review sort of explains why. It's kind of a critical "Dear John" letter. It wasn't you, Tom, it was me. But thanks for everything.
Everyone have a happy holiday and I promise to write more new posts soon!
posted by Brian @ 8:47 AM
3 Comments:
Brian,
Just read your feelings about Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia in the Oxonian Review. How prescient you were. Perhaps one could even push the argument further: is not the dependence on liberal humanism as the inevitable product of rationalist discourse the essential and irreducible core of the neoconservative philosophical project which was to have its heyday during the months following your writing of that review? In retrospect, Stoppard does not really seem so different from the (less funny) American political thinkers who demand that the metaphysical or "dialectical" modes of history are unrestrained philosophical self-indulgence.
Nonetheless, the passage you quote about "freedom" in which that libertarian - and specifically /not/ Marxian or socialist - shibboleth derives into "love" is an extreme and idiosyncratic point of view. Even Thatcher thought that there could be families capable of acting in each others' interests. And how could love of any kind flourish among people who were entirely self-gratified from the start? Indeed, the joke about "give oneself with love" could easily become a guilty reminder of the sin to "give oneself love."
Perhaps it was him, not you. I used to love him too, in fact: probably the first playwright I did love. How disappointing it all seems now, a few years and a few wars later.
jpdl
Jos -
Stoppard strikes me as less of a neo-con than an older kind of conservative -- a Burkean conservative who reveres "tradition." "Coast of Utopia" seems to me the most explicit example of his basic political thesis: revolution is a lovely idea, but it tends to get out of hand. Best to settle for small, manageable changes to society. (Stoppard himself has cited Isaiah Berlin as an influence on the script).
The neoconservatives are basically "revolutionaries," not people who are cautious or worried about manageability. What has their incursion in Iraq been if not an attempt to create a revolution. They started one, but it has blwon back in their face. Revolutions (or civil wars, whatever you want to call it), do tend to be hard to manage.
I don't know much about Stoppard's latest, "Rock and Roll," but from what I hear it also tends to espouse his "it'll all work out in the end" political philosophy by emphasizing the role of cultural forces (i.e. commercial capitalism) in "winning" the cold war.
I, for one, would LOVE to see a truly neo-con play performed. Let's see what they have to say through drama! One of the problems with the NYC theater scene (and I'm assuming the UK, too) is that all playwrights and audiences are essentially elite liberals telling one another things they already know. They limit their own horizons by continually re-circulating pre-processed ideas.
I heard David Mamet on TV the other day spouting what sounded like really neocon ideas (on Israel, not on Iraq) and that got me fired up to respond to him. I guess that people like Rumsfeld et al. don't need a stage on which to play out their ideas -- they got a chance to do that in Iraq. Unfortunately, the results were real.
I'm not sure about neocon drama but there are a few neoconservative movies I can think of. There have certainly been a few movies in that particular historical period known to the neocons as "post-9/11" in which a half-considered moral relativism is subjected to humiliation at the hands of a strong patriarchal symbol. Red Eye would be one, and Robots, maybe, in so far it is a direct reversal of the politics of Monsters Inc. (I can't overemphasise how the plot of Robots is pretty much a direct reversal of Monsters Inc.) In Red Eye the patriarchal resurgent is Brian Cox, rising from the apparent dead with a shotgun to destroy the effeminate airborn terrorist of indistinct nationality. Robots stages the reauthentication and restitution of the evil patriarchal capitalist from Monsters Inc., whose heirs are seen to use moral relativism as an excuse for ignoring oppression (the neocon critique of Clintonian constructive engagement, not to mention Chirac's position during the Iraq conflict.) Both films also repudiate bodily indeterminacy - either Cillian Murphy's languid form or the gooey, moveable bodies of Monsters Inc - and consequently reassert the value of muscular, impermeable, phallic shapes and textures.
... jpdl ... (um) ...
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