State of Revolution

by Robert Bolt

* from USA. Will take 25-35 days

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

From IMDB.com:

Son of a small shopkeeper, he attended Manchester Grammar School. He later said that he made poor uses of his opportunities there. He went to work in an insurance office, but later entered Manchester University, taking a degree in History. A post-graduate year at Exeter University led to a schoolmaster's position, first at a village school in Devon, then for seven years at Millfield. During this time he wrote a dozen radio plays, which were broadcast. Encouraged by the London success of his stage play "Flowering Cherry" he left teaching for full-time writing. 1960 saw two of his plays ("The Tiger And The Horse" and "A Man For All Seasons") running concurrently in the West End.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Bolt's State of Revolution was his final stage play, a fictionalization of the Russian Revolution little read and rarely performed due to its large cast and complicated dramaturgy. After a decade in Hollywood, Bolt's canvas is vast, perhaps too vast for the stage: he conjures a cast of dozens, large strikes, riots and battle scenes bustling about the frame, characters giving outsized speeches that declaim historical events and political positions in a manner that will leave many readers confused, lost or even bored. Which is a shame, because State is a robust work whose portraits of the Bolshevik leadership - the ruthless, power-seeking ideologue Lenin; the hot-blooded intellectual Trotsky, too smart and outspoken for his own good; the devious Stalin and weary Chekist Dzerzhinsky - are all convincingly rendered. Bolt is particularly strong showing the collision of revolutionary idealism with reality, whether in Trotsky's bickering exchanges with German diplomats, Stalin browbeating a recalcitrant Georgian comrade or Dzerzhinsky submerging his cultured personality in the hunt for subversives. Certainly Bolt, himself a disillusioned socialist, could draw heavily on personal experience here. The play fares weakest when Bolt tries to replicate the Brecht-inspired trappings of his earlier history plays like A Man for All Seasons, like the Bolshevik narrator Lunacharsky whose ironic exposition speeches clashes with the straightforward historicism of the show. Despite these shortcomings and some dated historiography, State is a historical play of uncommon power and intelligence; well worth-reading, though it's easy to see why it's rarely staged.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Men of past seasons

Robert Bolt is a playwright infused with confidence and focused purpose. State of Revolution is preceded by author’s characteristic lengthy introduction, which is actually more accessible than the play’s text. He is interested in the details of early 20th century Russian leadership, revolution, and its seminal figures like Trotsky, Stalin, and Lenin, all of whom figure prominently in the play.

There is a recurring theme of the unpredictability inherent to historical circumstance. Events choose an available personage able to rise to the occasion; a powerful and gifted figure will not ascend in the absence of the proper circumstances. The play is mostly dialectical and a combination of soliloquy and Joseph Heller-like dark comedy-of-words, in which both the truth and farce of the Socialist revolution in Russia is exposed.

Those learned in Russian history and World War-era eastern politics may find this two-act work more engaging than I did. It consists primarily of historical avatars talking at you, often ironically, telling but not showing. There is less drama, and more theorizing. It does not have the timeless quality of A Man for All Seasons, which can transcend any era and be appreciated by almost anyone of any culture.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can't say Robert Bolt wasn't ambitious, as he attempts to put on stage the slide from Lenin's monomaniacal commitment to proletarian revolution to Stalin's tyranny. But if the play could hardly be expected to live up to its ambition, it could also hardly be expected to have failed as spectacularly as it does. It's (poorly) framed with a speech given by Lunacharsky to some young communists, and seems at times to be about the failure of that obscure Commissar to bring love into the equation. But Lunacharsky is barely developed as a character (never mind as an idea), and everyone else is little more than a talking head, and not a very well-defined one at that. Bolt's talky history play format is not nearly up to the task of portraying such horrific monsters as Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky - and, given we're talking about mostly psychopathic mass-murderers, it's an entirely bloodless experience. Apparently Charlton Heston wanted to make a film of the play - it's hard to imagine him as Lenin - and Bolt, probably knowing himself he hadn't written a play that lived up to its subject, persuaded him out of it.

[Mahin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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