Let’s talk about theatre.
Yesterday, the 3rd of April 2017, I traveled out to the Apollo Theater to see a production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. Now, London is a wealthy city, but even in that context the interior of the Apollo seems excessively posh: the auditorium is gilded from floor to ceiling, adorned with cherubic figures, and fully dressed to the nines. Perhaps a bit much for my small-town sensibilities, but it did prepare me for the opera of excess that I was about to witness.
I love Stoppard’s work, but if I have a singular criticism for him it would be that he doesn’t know when to stop himself. I’ve read Arcadia and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, so I was already familiar with his rigorously intellectual, discursive and meta-theatrical style. Travesties is Stoppard at his most Stoppardian; there’s little concern for narrative, characterization, or what have you, and quite a lot of verbiage spent on arguing over the place of art in society. Also, wit. It is fitting that Travesties mirrors and outright copies Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, as Stoppard shares Wilde’s fancy for wit over substance. Indeed, were it not for Stoppard’s use of historical and literary characters, I’d scarcely be able to name a single person from the show.
Travesties is (among other things) a machine for jokes, a rapid-fire opera of Marxist theory & art criticism, and a stage for Stoppard to flaunt exactly how much cleverer he is than everyone in the audience. It’s not really a play, though, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Yes, there’s a framing narrative of old Henry Carr remembering and mis-remembering the events of an excursion to Switzerland, and yes, there’s some subplots involving Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and a production of Being Earnest, but they’re not terribly important. Carr and his faulty memories only serve to create a setting where Dublin’s most famous poet and one of the fathers of Dada can argue about art, in a high point of the show; he plays second fiddle to an intellectual forum and sets up jokes. Not much changes from beginning to end: the only real shift is that Lenin leaves Switzerland after spending some time there, and Carr starts to remember his past differently. There isn’t so much a plot as a string of dialogues on topics ranging from Marxist class theory to linguistics and Beethoven, culminating in a reimagining of Being Earnest that mostly seems to be there for fun. Ultimately, Carr’s life and story are pointless – though I suppose pointlessness is rather a point of the show.
I would be sparing about advising this show to anyone who doesn’t have a background in early-20th century French philosophy, Joyce, art theory, and Oscar Wilde. It’s still funny enough on the merits of its writing and the talents of its cast to be an entertaining three hours if you don’t, but it’s not light entertainment by any means. Stoppard’s target is your brain, not your heart, your eyes, or your ears. As it happened, I’ve spent quite some time studying Dadaism, Irish poetry, and art theory separately, so I quite enjoyed the script. Watching Travesties is very much like watching a visual representation of a brilliant mind playing with an intellectual curiosity: it’s quick, digressive, passionate, and irreverent. Many credits to the cast at the Apollo for their ability to play such angles onstage – the script demands a mode of performance entirely different from the subdued realistic methods pervasive in modern dramas, and these actors rose to the occasion.
In closing, if you’re the type of person who could appreciate and laugh at a joke beginning with “James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara walk into a bar,” you’d like Travesties. If you’re not, don’t worry about it; very few of us are Tom Stoppard, after all.
