rm | Coast of Utopia, pt. 1

Amazing. More amazing than I was anticipating and in ways I didn't expect. The staging was both intelligent and innovative and really perfectly, perfectly executed -- certainly, I didn't expect the play to make me have directorial itchiness, but that was exactly what it provoked. Also, great use of music.

The performances were also astounding, with people in, what I thought, were somewhat unlikely roles. Or, perhaps I was just surprised by the nuance in the characters in a time and place and style of play that really could have easily chosen to forgone it and not received too much criticism for it. Billy Crudup plays this bumbling, unnattractive, nervous, lovesick, overwraught critic, and yet, we find out at the end of the play, he's the only guy getting laid, and suddenly we are aware of the character as more deeply human than than perhaps even his peers are.

The play is constantly playful and matter of fact and just surprising and surprising and surprising, even as Stoppard does stuff that's just insane (um, there's this matter of a giant ginger cat) and while it doesn't quite work is at least audacious enough to keep you caring that someone tried to go there, although god knows why.

So now begining the hunt to try to see the other two parts.

I do, however, have a question for anyone who knows a lot about Russian history and the orthodox church, however. At the time of the play, the 1840s, Russian estates were measured not in acres, but in "souls" - that is the number of adult male serfs on the estate. I know that in the Roman Catholic church whether women had souls was not always a given. Were women considered to have souls in the Orthodox church at this time? When did the Orthodox church come to this decision? I'm trying to figure something out in terms of Russia's feelings towards France in particular (the aristocracy admired France in one centry; those looking to depose it admired it in another) and its place in time, and I feel like the answer might be buried in this.