TRAVESTIES
Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1
Opened 4 October, 2016
****

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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