Travesties

By Tom Stoppard

"Travesties" was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholly riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Release date: May 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9780802195326

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Reviews for Travesties

[fhudnell-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Except for the occasional line that is both intelligible and perceptive, this is just gibberish. I like some Stoppard, although he always insists on demonstrating that he's the smartest man in the room, but I didn't find this play accessible.

[regularguy5mb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stoppard is definitely one of my favorite playwrights. I have probably recommended "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to everyone I know at least twice. So, I'm finally taking a look at Travesties, which was recommended to me through the Goodreads recommendation system after adding R&G. I can definitely see why it's so well respected.After noticing that James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara (founder of Dadaism) were all in Zurich in 1917, Stoppard took advantage of that fact to try to connect them to the rather obscure character of Henry Carr, British Consul. The play is written from the perspective of Carr as an old man looking back on this very interesting moment in history. Of course, memory being rather fleeting and uncontrollable, Carr seems to be a little muddled about the exact details, confusing what actually happened with his performance of Algernon ("the other one") in Joyce's staging of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest."While the characters discuss the purpose of art and the coming revolution, Carr shadily recollects his part in the events of the day. Stoppard uses his mastery of wit and wordplay to create this beautifully absurd piece of theatrical gold. I'd love to see this performed some day.

[devil_llama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An unusual work, combining Stoppard's own style with that of Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, while exploring the role of imagination in recreating memories. Specifically, he brings James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin together with a minor British official who once took the role of Algernon in Wilde's most famous play. Told from the standpoint of an old man looking back at his past, with abundant flashbacks and strange stuttering time loops, he adds the appropriately named Cecily and Gwendolyn into the mix to complicate things still further. An exploration of art, politics, and memory that confuses and complicates all of life's big questions. Definitely worth the read.

[leslie398 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

OMG, I had forgotten (or not fully realized) how absolutely hilarious this play is! When I saw it in the theater back in the 1970s, I must have focused on the homage to/parody of The Importance of Being Earnest because the James Joyce bits certainly were over my head then. Brief description: Henry Carr is recalling his days in the British Consulate in Zurich Switzerland during WW1, when James Joyce, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), and Tzara (one of the founders of Dadaism) are all there. These 4 are historical figures who actually were in Zurich in 1917. In a bow to Oscar Wilde, there are also Cecily and Gwendolyn - Cecily works at the library helping Lenin write a book on imperialism while Gwendolyn (Henry's sister) is helping Joyce research Homer's Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory of 1904!! In addition to wickedly funny parodies of Dadaism, Joyce's Ulysses, and Bolshevism, the plot parallels Wilde's with the phony brother and mistaken identities.

[ffortsa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've seen quite a few plays by Stoppard, some wonderful, some riotously funny. The humor of this depends in part on your knowledge of Oscar Wilde's [The Importance of Being Ernest] and of Joyce's [Ulysses] which Stoppard bends to his own purposes.But it's really a thought experiment wherein James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and the man who would become Lenin are supposedly in Zurich at the same time, just before Lenin travels in a sealed train through Germany to Russia. While the first act weaves in and out of the referenced plays, the second is an extended debate about politics. Naturally, I didn't remember the second act, and will have to read it again before discussing it with my uptown book circle. It was really nice to revisit this text.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A masterful fizz of mature 70s Stoppard, this extravagantly brilliant play is, like many of his best works, sketched in the margins of existing literary history. Stoppard noticed, apparently for the first time, that Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Lenin were all in neutral Zurich at about the same time during the First World War. Travesties imagines how they might have interacted, and it does so with real brio – including one scene written entirely in limericks, another imitating a chapter of Ulysses, and several pastiches of The Importance of Being Earnest (a play that James Joyce was paid to stage for the British Council in 1917).It had been many years since I last read this or saw it performed, and despite my happy memories of it, I had forgotten quite how wonderful it is. The central argument concerns the nature and purpose of art, a subject on which the various characters hold very different views. The fact that these discussions are taking place while thousands are being slaughtered on Europe's battlefields is very much of the essence.My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.The speaker here is Henry Carr, British consular representative in Zurich, who anchors the play and brings the rest of the cast together. He is suspicious of Tzara's newfangled modern-art sensibilities, despite the Dadaist's attempts to explain himself:TZARA: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat.CARR: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art.TZARA: I see I have made myself clear.I could quote the whole of this scene and not run out of lines I want to share with people. As always with Stoppard, he is unique in the even-handedness of these debates: there is no sense that one character's viewpoint is ‘privileged’ as speaking for the author. Stoppard famously said he became a playwright because it was the only respectable way of disagreeing with himself, and the arguments in Travesties are a good example of this.Joyce disagrees with Tzara over what art should be, but he makes a passionate case for its importance.What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots.But Henry Carr, nursing a wound he got in the trenches, is suspicious of this position too. His mistrust of Joyce – which culminates in a lawsuit – is the backdrop for probably the play's most famous line, which closes the first act:I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him – ‘And what did you do in the Great War?’ ‘I wrote Ulysses,’ he said. ‘What did you do?’Bloody nerve.All Stoppard's trademarks are here in spades – the verbal pyrotechnics, the deep grounding in literature and history, the love of debate, the willingness to include crowd-pleasing gimmicks and daft jokes (‘Have you ever come across Dada, darling?’ ‘Never, da-da-darling!’), and above all, perhaps, the general questioning of certainty that characterises his oeuvre as a whole. Maybe it's not his very best play – that, I think, is Arcadia – but it might be his most Stoppardian, and it's a masterpiece of condensed thought and wit.