Voyage (Tom Stoppard)

I was thinking a bit more about Voyage, which was pretty damn stunning both in terms of the ambition of the script, and scale of the production, even if I must admit that some of its countless historical and philosophical allusions were probably lost on me at eleven in the morning. At the end of the play we felt satisfied enough that we’d understood its highfalutin’ philosophical themes, but still had to devote some time to clarifying who got off with who, and why. Guess there’s some way Stoppard has to go before he’s good enough to join the team at East Enders.

Something else I noticed – another example of what seems to be a frequently-used theatrical device of quick, easy, evocation of a character in terms of their accent. In Lord Of The Rings, one of the dim hobbits just happened to sound Irish. Here, Belinsky’s lack of formal education somehow seems to be suggested more by his distinctly unposh (English) accent than by the oft-repeated fact that he can’t read French. And of course everyone in the play’s actually Russian, so where does that leave us in the Michellian School of Theatre Commentary? I don’t actually know. This is why I took the safe option of a legal degree.