THE STAGE
Weales, Gerald
THE STAGE By now anyone within reach of a New York publica-tion knows-vaguely, at least-what Tom Stoppard's Travesties is about. In Richard EUmann's James Joyce, the playwright came across an...
...Stoppard has been doing a soft-shoe around existential chaos ever since he turned up in the English theater, and Travesties is either his blackest statement to date or his assumption that the surface joke is what counts...
...Audiences are invited to warm themselves at the fires of self-congratulation as they recognize the use and misuse of lines and scenes from Earnest (and from Hamlet: Stoppard did write Rosencrantz and Guilden-siern Are Dead...
...Discov-ering or remembering that both Lenin and Tristan Tzara, like Joyce, were sitting out the war in Zurich, Stoppard decided to mix a little fact and a lot of fancy into a melange of revolutionary art and politics...
...I know, from having seen him in The Comedy of Errors at Stratford, that the actor I so admired in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Sherlock Holmes could fill a part without enriching it...
...It moves cheerfully from parody to direct quotation to song-and-dance to monologue...
...For instance, Tim Curry-fresh from The Rocky Horror Show, surely one of the most nauseous of recent English successes-is an amusing and stylish Tzara...
...John Wood has been excessively praised for bis Henry Carr, the longest and most demanding role in the play, but I found him disappointing...
...as they snap up snippets of Joyce and nibble nuggets of Lenin...
...Henry Carr is Stoppard's device and his main character, an old man inventing his memoirs, remembering a might-have-been society of those heady Zurich days in which historical figures become interchangeable with the characters in Wilde's play...
...All of the performers are asked to play long and com-plicated speeches at a clip which suggests that it is the sound more than the meaning of the words that interests Stoppard and his director, Peter Wood...
...The disenchanted tone of this review should not be taken as a blanket condemnation of the play...
...Since I tend to think that Rosencrantz and Guilden-sternhasa genuine point to make about the relation of role to identity and that Jumpers is a serious statement about the failures of traditional humanism, I expected to find substance under the glitter of Travesties...
...the performance ended in a legal dispute be-tween Joyce and Carr over a pair of trousers and in Carr's finding his way into the pages of Ulysses...
...It is a lively show, often funny, frequently foolish, which managed to hold my attention for almost three hours...
...Still, as one allusively witty rain of words after another dropped on my head, I found myself remembering Dynamene's line from Christopher Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent: "You needn't/Labor to prove your secondary education...
...as they savor the double-joke of the Cecily-Gwendolen meeting from Ernest being done as a Gallagher-and-Sheean turn...
...There is, however, a pedagogical undertone which assumes that the audience may need a little guidance in these matters, and Stoppard has devised a variety of comic tricks to disguise great chunks of exposition...
...The characters are conceived and performed as cartoons, most of them effectively...
...his Henry Carr is such a collection of winks, nods, grimaces and palsied kicks and totters that it becomes a caricature of a caricature...
...Judging from other reviews, from comments by friends and fellow playgoers, from interviews with Stoppard and John Wood (who plays Henry Carr), I gather that the play is being offered and taken primarily as a literary game...
...I tend toward the second reading, classing Travesties with After Magritte rather than Jumpers...
...James Booth's Joyce on the other hand, completely escaped me as a conception, if he is supposed to be the standard stage Irishman, he fails, and if he is supposed to be something else, I never figured out what it is...
...The word travesty is used just once in the play, when Henry Carr, recalling the legal decision which went against him, labels it "a travesty of justice...
...In Richard EUmann's James Joyce, the playwright came across an account of a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, put on in Zurich in 1918, for which James Joyce was business manager and Henry Can, a minor British consular official, played Algernon...
...The Russian revolution, the writing of Ulysses, the anarchic implications of Dada have the same validity and the same importance as the cucumber sandwiches in The Importance of Being Earnest...
...The script is a cornuco-pia of puns, jokes and allusions, and it is played at a ver-bal deadrun...
...This usage suggests to me that the travesties of the play are not simply those of the ideas and words of Joyce, Lenin and Tzara, but that- in his usual pessimistic way--Stoppard is viewing all of art and politics as travesty, and certainly, through Carr's reminiscence, the remembered Me becomes burlesque...
...The result, as one has come to expect from Stoppard, is an intellectual knockout comedy which may -or may not-have serious implications...
...The most obvious example is a mock interview in which Joyce elicits some of the history and theory of Dada from Tzara...
...GERALD...
Vol. 103 • February 1976 • No. 4
