Theatre in Review: Travesties (Roundabout Theatre Company)

	Peter McDonald, Tom Hollander, Scarlett Srallen, Sara Topham. Photo: Joan Marcus

Travesties is a madhouse of a play, and, at Roundabout, under the direction of Patrick Marber, it is elegantly appointed and filled with the best sort of lunatics. In this 1974 work, the playwright takes notice of the fact that James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara, a founder of the Dada art movement, all lived in Zurich during World War One. Around this time, Joyce, who was involved in amateur theatricals -- principally a production of The Importance of Being Earnest -- became embroiled in dueling lawsuits with Henry Carr, a minor British consular official who appeared as Algernon Moncrieff in Wilde's comedy. Out of these facts, Stoppard spins the maddest of intellectual farces: The elderly Carr presents his memoirs of all three men -- and, thanks to his dimming mental faculties, scrambles the facts, invents confrontations that never happened, and unwittingly embroils them all in the plot of Oscar Wilde's classic comedy.

The result is less a play than an intellectual Cirque du Soleil in which the acrobats are ideas and the most daring leaps are literary and philosophical; the principal clown is the author himself, indulging his freewheeling sense of humor and presiding over an anything-goes atmosphere. The action begins in the reading room of the Zurich library with a burst of cacophony: Joyce dictating his famously impenetrable prose, Lenin and his wife conversing in Russian, and Tzara reciting one of his nonsense poems, all them shushed by the indignant librarian. Immediately, Henry is established as the most unreliable of narrators; every time his memory jumps the rails, a rising static-like sound is stopped by a bell, and the scene begins again. There are outrageous puns ("My art belongs to Dada"), an entire scene written in limericks, and a Gallagher-and-Shean vaudeville routine for the two leading ladies, named (of course) Cecily and Gwendolen; just to keep the audience on its toes, this last bit of business is layered on top of the teatime confrontation between the similarly named characters in The Importance of Being Earnest.

In Carr's muddled recollection, he is a young dandy who routinely takes part in fantasticated encounters with these seminal figures of art and politics. The extremely tall lectern at stage center bursts open to emit Tzara, his hat filled with paper from a poem he has cut up into pieces. When Henry insists, "It is the duty of the artist to beautify existence," Tzara's suave response ("Dada dada dada dada...") goes on for several lines. Explaining his need to tear down Western civilization, he says, "It is the duty of the artist to jeer and howl and belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effect can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause." He enjoys reminiscing about "the triumph at the Meierei Bar of our noise concert for siren, rattle, and fire-extinguisher." Once in a while, however, he can make his own singular contribution to art: For example, Cecily's rendition of a portion of Molly Bloom's monologue gets an extra goose of feeling because Tzara has his head up her skirt.

Henry has a much spikier time with Joyce, whom he constantly remembers as "Doris" and other feminine names, adding with asperity that "Joyce is a name which could only expose a child to comment around the font." He also insists that the first draft of Ulysses was titled Elasticated Bloomers. This is in part because Henry is no more pleased with Joyce's insanely complicated literary style than he is with Tzara's attempts to turn all art into nonsense and nonsense into art. He also has little use for Joyce's grandly patronizing manners and his willingness to go to court to settle a minor financial dispute. The older Henry dreams he is cross-examining Joyce in a witness box, trying to subdue him with a single question: "And what did you do during the Great War? 'I wrote Ulysses,' he said. 'What did you do?'" Dismissing Tzara as an "over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression beyond your natural gifts," he launches into an authoritative defense of art, without which, for example, the Trojan War would have been "a forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots." Not for nothing does the author of Ulysses proffer this example, and before long he is praising his own "Dublin Odyssey" before delivering a parting shot at Tzara -- and pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

Travesties is alert to the fact that, while Joyce and Tzara are battling it out, egged on by Henry, not very far away an entire generation of Europe's men are being led to the slaughter. The war also gives Lenin an opportunity to return home and seize power. Henry is charged with spying on the Russian, but utterly botches the job; in contrast, Bennett, his butler, is thoroughly up to speed about the revolution in Moscow, offering detailed color commentary that leaves his employer bored and distracted. But Lenin is not entirely immune from the artistic debate raging around him: We learn that he loves La Dame aux Camélias, Beethoven, and Tolstoy, although the last also comes in for some scathing criticism. (Of course, none of his tender feelings for, say, the Appassionata sonata, will matter when the show trials and mass killings begin.) And even Lenin -- at least in Henry's recollection -- gets bitten by the Wilde bug: As he says, when hurrying off to Moscow, "To lose one revolution may be regarded as misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness."

Rattling around behind all the poses, feuds, schemes, switched manuscripts, and denunciations - sooner or later, everyone gets a furious takedown, as when Cecily refers to Henry (whom she thinks is Tzara) as a "swanking, canting fop, you bourgeois intellectual humbugger" -- is the realization that, out of the carnage of war and loss of belief in the old order, revolutions are taking place in art, literature, and politics. The twentieth century is presenting its face, and its expression is both mandarin and power-hungry.

Marber orchestrates this organized chaos superbly, aided by a brilliant turn by Tom Hollander as Henry. In his younger incarnation, he delivers each acid observation with pinpoint precision. ("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.") When the action turns into a frantic mish-mash of mixed-up identities, he proves to be an expert farceur. And, as the elderly Henry, he shuffles about in a drab, dispiriting bathrobe, trying out different titles for the memoir that will never be written, his eyes fixed firmly on the distance, as if he expects the Grim Reaper to come calling at any minute. It is an extraordinarily difficult role, delivered extraordinarily.

Each cast member makes a distinctive contribution to the fast-flowing madness. Peter McDonald's Joyce is airily supercilious, convinced of his contribution to history. As Tzara, Seth Numrich is a fop's fop; at one point, he enters, lifts a leg, and places it on top of a piano -- apparently just because he can do it. Dan Butler's Lenin has a natural authority, as does Opal Alladin's Nadya, his wife, whose devotion doesn't preclude a certain detachment about his complex inner life. Scarlett Strallen's Gwendolen -- "so innocent she does not stop to wonder what possible book could be derived from reference to Homer's Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory for 1904" -- is a delightful literary acolyte, as is Sara Topham's Cecily, a political camp-follower, whose passionate defense of communism is interrupted by a sexy table dance. Patrick Kerr is assurance itself as the butler with an unbeatable grasp of world affairs, who also humiliates Carr by quoting La Rochefoucauld in the original French.

For a play that moves between Carr's apartment and the library reading room, Tim Hatley has created a maze of wall units laid out on several levels, each piece topped with piles of books; the floor is covered with pages of manuscript -- presumably, the castoffs of all these scribblers. Hatley's costumes are full of witty touches, including the red highlights for Cecily, the fellow traveler, and Joyce's constantly mismatched suits, the jackets never agreeing with the pants. Neil Austin's lighting lovingly treats the set's architectural details; he also produces hard followspots for the musical interludes, bathes the stage in a warm, lamplit wash for the elderly Henry, and frames Lenin and Nadya in a chilling white backlight for their triumphant return home. Adam Cork provides both the original music and the sound system that delivers such effects a seagulls, surf, birdsong, and applause.

Many find Travesties to be dauntingly difficult, and, in truth, Stoppard's erudition and the convoluted structure, in which arguments bang about like pinballs, make no concession to the audience. But the program tells you all you need to know, and if you listen closely, you'll likely be mesmerized by the playwright's wit and his concern for ideas that played an enormous role in shaping the last century -- and which continue to have an effect today. Forty years on, this is still one of the playwright's most impressive achievements.-- David Barbour