Free Shipwreck by Tom Stoppard

   My wife is in an interesting condition, did I tell you?
    HERZEN    Good for Nick!
    NATALIE    It all started before Christmas!
    GEORGE    Well, it’s not very interesting. In fact, it’s the least interesting condition she’s ever in.
    NATALIE    I’m going to write to her this minute!
    GEORGE    (
vaguely
) Oh … all right.
    NATALIE    Let me see what he says.
    Natalie, delighted, takes Herzen’s letter and gives him hers. She hurries out
.
    GEORGE    There was always something that appealed to me about Ogarev. I don’t know what it was … He’s such a vague, lazy, hopeless sort of person. (
Pause.
) I thought he had a wife. He had a wife when I knew him in Paris.
    HERZEN    Maria.
    GEORGE    Maria! She kept company with a painter, to speak loosely. Well, he applied paint to canvas and was said to have a large brush. Did she die?
    HERZEN    No, she’s alive and kicking.
    GEORGE    What’s to be done about marriage? We should have a programme, like Proudhon. ‘Property is theft, except for wives.’
    HERZEN    Proudhon’s programme of shackles from altar to coffin is an absurdity. Passions are facts. Making cages for them is the vanity of Utopians, preachers, lawgivers … Still, passions running free, owing nothing to yesterday or tomorrow, isn’t what you’d call a programme either. Ogarev is my programme. He’s the only man I know who lives true to his beliefs. Fidelity is admirable, but proprietorship disgusting. But Maria was vain, flighty, I worried for Nick. She was not like my Natalie. But with Ogarev, love doesn’t turn out to be pride. It’s love like on the label, and he suffered it. You think that’s weakness? No, it’s strength.
    Natalie enters wearing a hat and adjusts it, pleased, in an imaginary mirror
.
    MARIA OGAREV,
aged thirty-six, poses nude for an unseen painter
.
    HERZEN    (
cont.
) He’s a free man because he gives away freely. I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided uplike a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the cooperation of other people—who are each making the same balance for themselves. What is the largest number of individuals who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.
    A PRIL 1849
    Natalie looks around. She reacts to an (imaginary) painting. Maria enters, robing herself
.
    MARIA    I’ve already written to Nick … I told him I had no intention of marrying again, and so had no need of a divorce.
    NATALIE    No … the need is Nick’s.
    MARIA    Exactly. Mine is to protect my position as his wife.
    NATALIE    Your position? But Maria, you haven’t been his wife for years now, except in name.
    MARIA    That’s a large exception, and while it’s so, there’s three hundred thousand roubles in the six-per-cents, secured against his property. Where would it leave me if I were divorced? Worse still when there’s a new wife with her own ideas about her position. You know what a child Nicholas is about money. Anyone can get round him. He had four thousand souls when his father died, and almost the first thing he did was hand over the largest property tohis serfs. He’s simply not someone you can depend on. And now he sends you to plead for him and his eager bride. Do you know her?
    NATALIE    (
nods
) The Tuchkovs went home last year. Nick knew