Dialectics at the Coast of Utopia:Interruptions and Situations in Tom Stoppard’s Trilogy

Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” is an epic ۹-hour trilogy. Consisting of three parts, “Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” and “Salvage,” Stoppard takes us to pre-revolution Russia in a span of ۳۰ years and with around ۷۰ characters, most of whom are Russian revolutionary intellectuals. The material of Stoppard’s plays doesn’t require a spectator to engage in willing suspension of disbelief. His is a theatre of ideas “forced to invent characters to express those ideas.” Thus, his characters don’t plead for the sympathy of their audience either. Stoppard instead invites his spectator to question the situations he reveals as he toys with the ideas at hand. This places Stoppard’s theatre in proximity to Bertolt Brecht’s Epic theatre as it was interpreted by Walter Benjamin, and in this paper, I intend to observe the moments of “situation” and “interruption” as they arise in Stoppard’s play, identifying their function according to Benjamin’s understanding of the aims of Epic theatre.

کلیدواژه ها:

“Walter Benjamin ، ” “Tom Stoppard ، ” “Epic Theatre ، ” “The Coast of Utopia ، ” “Bertolt Brecht ، ” “Dialectics”