Tom Stoppard is indisputably a genius,
both as a playwright and as a, well, genius, but sometimes I secretly
yearn to say to him what the Martians told Woody Allen in
Stardust Memories: that I enjoy his
works, “particularly the early, funny ones”.
Travesties (1974) is prime early,
funny Stoppard.
Taking as his cue the improbable fact that James Joyce, Lenin and the
Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara were all in Zürich at the same time during
World War One (so was Einstein; thank God Sir Tom didn’t go too far),
he has taken a minor incident – Joyce’s feud with British consular
official Henry Carr resulting from an amateur production of
The Importance Of Being Earnest –
and created an intricate fretwork of political and philosophical
exchanges, jokes so densely packed that when you laugh at one you miss
the next three, stylistic fireworks and general high-jinks involving an
Englishman, an Irishman, a Russian and a Romanian. It all centres on
the now-elderly Carr, whose reminiscences of his younger, dapper days
keep jumping the rails.
It’s true that sometimes Stoppard’s pulpit-bashing impulse pokes out
too far: Carr is a thoroughly unreliable narrator but, paradoxically, a
fairly consistent authorial surrogate when pronouncing on art or
politics. Luckily, after a deliberately slow and sombre start and
despite some low-key playing choices at times, Patrick Marber’s
production allows the clever humour the upper hand. Various scenes take
place entirely in limericks, patter-song,
Ulysses-ese and even Russian, and a
good half of the playing time consists of pastiches of
Earnest, with cucumber sandwiches
flung around with abandon.
At the centre of it all is Tom Hollander’s Carr, a far more masterly
performance than he lets on as he alternates between doddering and an
obsession with the tailoring of trousers. (No, it all makes a kind of
sense, really.) He is ably supported by Freddie Fox as a playfully
attractive Tzara, Forbes Masson as an oddly Welsh-sounding Lenin and
Peter McDonald who becomes the spitting image of Deirdre... I mean
Bridget... that is, Joyce. (Hey, I never said
all the gags were highbrow.) It’s
the perfect Stoppardian mix of the intellectually heavy and the
soufflé-light.
Written for the Financial
Times.