Reviews for Travesties

The average rating for Travesties based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-20 00:00:00 WILLIAM Richmond A masterful fizz of mature 70s Stoppard, this extravagantly brilliant play is, like many of his best works, sketched in the margins of existing literary history. Stoppard noticed, apparently for the first time, that Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Lenin were all in neutral Zurich at about the same time during the First World War. Travesties imagines how they might have interacted, and it does so with real brio - including one scene written entirely in limericks, another imitating a chapter of Ulysses, and several pastiches of The Importance of Being Earnest (a play that James Joyce was paid to stage for the British Council in 1917). It had been many years since I last read this or saw it performed, and despite my happy memories of it, I had forgotten quite how wonderful it is. The central argument concerns the nature and purpose of art, a subject on which the various characters hold very different views. The fact that these discussions are taking place while thousands are being slaughtered on Europe's battlefields is very much of the essence. My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus. The speaker here is Henry Carr, British consular representative in Zurich, who anchors the play and brings the rest of the cast together. He is suspicious of Tzara's newfangled modern-art sensibilities, despite the Dadaist's attempts to explain himself: TZARA: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat. CARR: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art. TZARA: I see I have made myself clear. I could quote the whole of this scene and not run out of lines I want to share with people. As always with Stoppard, he is unique in the even-handedness of these debates: there is no sense that one character's viewpoint is 'privileged' as speaking for the author. Stoppard famously said he became a playwright because it was the only respectable way of disagreeing with himself, and the arguments in Travesties are a good example of this. Joyce disagrees with Tzara over what art should be, but he makes a passionate case for its importance. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But Henry Carr, nursing a wound he got in the trenches, is suspicious of this position too. His mistrust of Joyce - which culminates in a lawsuit - is the backdrop for probably the play's most famous line, which closes the first act: I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him - 'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses,' he said. 'What did you do?' Bloody nerve. All Stoppard's trademarks are here in spades - the verbal pyrotechnics, the deep grounding in literature and history, the love of debate, the willingness to include crowd-pleasing gimmicks and daft jokes ('Have you ever come across Dada, darling?' 'Never, da-da-darling!'), and above all, perhaps, the general questioning of certainty that characterises his oeuvre as a whole. Maybe it's not his very best play - that, I think, is Arcadia - but it might be his most Stoppardian, and it's a masterpiece of condensed thought and wit. (Feb 2014)

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-03 00:00:00 James Callaghan 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