Travesties Book

Tom Stoppard is my favourite contemporary playwright. This is not my favourite of his plays* and the first act is much stronger than the second, but it's still a gem. In it, Stoppard takes a coincidence of history and spins it into an intelligent comedy with a serious point.

The narrative and themes come from the fact that for a period in 1917, three revolutionaries - James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin - were all residing in Zurich. They apparently didn't meet, but Stoppard imagines a world in which they did. Or at least a world in which they might have met, for the play's narrator, an aging minor British consular official named Henry Carr, is not exactly reliable.

In real life, Carr and Joyce were acquainted. In his spare time - when he wasn't writing episodes of Ulysses - Joyce was the business manager of a group called the English Players. With the support of the British consulate, the group put on a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. Carr played Algernon and he and Joyce ended up in litigation over the cost of trousers and tickets. This quirky footnote in Joyce's life gave Henry Carr a place in history and role of a different kind in Stoppard's play.

The serious point of this work is its discussion of the meaning and purpose of art. Is art meant to be revolutionary? Should art only exist for art's sake? Is something art because the artist says it is? This theme is explored in a pastiche of The Importance of Being Earnest, a scene written in limericks, another scene written in the style of a chapter of Ulysses . It contains an abundance of Stoppard's extraordinary cleverness with words and plenty of inspired silliness.

Although I'm passionate about theatre, I haven't really read plays since studying English and French literature at university. I would much rather see a play performed than read it. Just as songwriters write songs to be sung and composers write musical scores to be played, playwrights write plays to be performed. And although the best actors and the most receptive audience in the world can't turn dross into gold, they can give wings to words that would otherwise be flat on the page.

In spite of my reluctance to read plays, I was inspired to do so on this occasion by the fact that I'm currently reading Gordon Bowker's biography of Joyce. Last week I reached the chapter dealing with Joyce's experiences in Zurich in 1917. I then remembered that I'd heard this story before when I saw an excellent production of Travesties about six years ago. That was all the inspiration I needed to read the play. I'm really glad I did. It's a lot of fun.

*That would be either Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead