'Travesties' by Sir Tom Stoppard

Travesties is one of Stoppard's most brilliant and inventive plays and is long overdue a reprise.  As Ms. 'Mayfly' reminds me in a comments thread below, I had the very real pleasure of directing it in 1997/8 - can't be sure which year exactly.  I have just dug the old programme out and as I was rather pleased, then and now, with the programme notes I have decided to inflict them reproduce them here.  If you're not sleeping well I advise reading them just prior to going to bed!

Sir Tom Stoppard reminds me of a bird, one of those bright-eyed waders that step carefully through water until with a sudden flash their beak descends and rises with a juicy morsel.  Thus, I imagine Sir Tom wading through the London Library and snapping up the unconsidered trifle of an historical fact that in Zurich, in 1917, the British consul, Henry Carr, sued James Joyce for the price of a pair of trousers used in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest.  Co-incidentally, in that city at that time, Tristan Tzara and his artistic cronies were dreaming up the Dada-ist movement, and a mere Molotov-cocktail's throw away, Lenin was dreaming up the Russian revolution.  From these disparate ingredients, Sir Tom whips up a brilliant and witty concoction of a play.

The clue to its form lies in its title.  Everyone in it is more or less a travesty of their original.  Thus, Henry Carr and Tristan Tzara become travesties of Algy Moncreiff and Jack Worthing from The Importance and our Gwendolen and Cecily are travesties of their namesakes, and our butler, Bennet, a travesty of Merriman.  James Joyce becomes a travesty of every stage 'Oirishman' you ever wished you hadn't seen.  Only Lenin (and his long-suffering wife, Nadya Krupskaya) are left alone, possibly because Lenin, being the first of the great 20th century monsters, is beyond parody.  All of the dialogue  from the Lenins is taken directly from their own writings with one delicious exception when this arch-Bolshevik revolutionary is given a few lines of pure Lady Bracknell to deliver.

With the sort of panache which Wilde himself would surely have applauded, Sir Tom weaves whole chunks of dialogue from The Importance into his play.  Shakespeare makes an appearance with his 18th sonnet which is turned into a Dada-ist poem with startling results for Gwendolen and, as a double parody, Stoppard then produces his own Dada-ist dialogue by picking and piecing together individual sentences from a host of Shakespeare plays.  The 'Catechism' section of questions and answers from Joyce's Ulysses is gently mocked but provides an entertaining way for us to learn how and by whom Dada was born.  This is not so much a 'memory play' as a 'bad memory play', in that it all emanates from the inner recesses of a very old man reminiscing about events 60 years ago in his youth.  Needless to say his memory plays tricks on him, as does Sir Tom on us!  In the choice of music and set design I have tried to match his sense of fun (if not his wit) and place before you a 'travesty’ of a production. [My old programme reminds me that I chose the following music: Spike Jones and his Musical Depreciation Society; 2nd Piano Concerto by Shostakovich; 'The Stripper' by David Rose; 'The Appassionato' by Beethoven - need I say more?]

There is a danger, in this and other Stoppard plays, of being so dazzled by the brilliant construction and inventiveness that we miss the serious intent beneath the frothy wit.  This is a pity for Sir Tom, who like many another humourist is a very serious man indeed.  He is, above all, an intellectual; that is, a man who is fascinated, excited and stimulated by the world of ideas.  In this play his main theme can be expressed as a deceptively easy question: What is Art? and its corollary, What is an Artist?  This is a legitimate question when one remembers that the whole concept of Art (with a capital ‘A’) is no more than 250 years old.  Prior to that, an artist was simply an artisan, or as Henry Carr puts it in the play, “Someone with a facility for doing something more or less well that would be done badly or not at all by anyone else”.  The question becomes more immediate when one contemplates the grossly distended and insatiable Arts industry swinging from the teat of government money (or MY money as fondly think of it), only pausing between slurps to complain about “lack of resources" (or MY money . . . etc, etc.)

I suspect that Sir Tom failed to provide himself with a satisfactory answer and (here I speculate) that he believes that around the turn of the century the Arts drove up a cul-de-sac and that what we now enjoy(?) from the modernist movement is the result of that crash.   Music that sounds like screeching brakes, bits of twisted metal, body parts suspended in formaldehyde and Dada-ist poems created by picking at random cut up words from your hat!  I think he turned away from that sterile world and returned to his first love, Philosophy, and its younger companion, Science, as the most fertile area for ideas.  It is, after all, the philosophers who, over thousands of years, have always asked the really important and fundamental questions and in the last 300 years it is the scientists who have come up with the mind-blowing answers.

Yes, indeed, that was my programme note and thus my production set a new theatrical record as being the first one in which the audience was asleep at the begining of the play as well as the end!

 

Comments

[JK]

Any chance David, your archives go back to 1997/98?

I'd enjoy reading whether you "predicted" Blair was gonna be a Hamlet or whether a Coriolanus.

(As for why I'm not commenting on "Andra's Tits" post - I began feeling very faint just reading it - I'm not used to aerobics. Besides, I'm divorced now going on fifteen years - looking at pert, delectable, fresh, peachy, firm, delicious-appearing, squeezily-looking, yummy, ...

Anyway, without a wife to yell at me - I get lost in tits.)

[Andra]

Ah, JK, go to bed.....perchance to dream.

[Mayfly]

And it is nice to think that one person was so enamoured with the play that his email address still reads "Tristan Zara" in honour of the show.

I'm afraid that Jemima passed away some time ago, but we still remember her.

I will send a more comprehensive reply later to your email.