Another definitive-as-you-might-wish Stoppard production. I had a nightmare of a time teaching Travesties a couple of years ago to students whose range of cultural reference didn't, for the most part, cover the play's. This meant in effect that I needed to explain all of the jokes, which (naturally) destroyed them as jokes. I basically said, over and over again, "well, if you know who that was, and when this was, and where this is, you'd find this hilarious." Happily, I can report that, for those who get the jokes, everything remains extremely funny here. I recently saw an academic at a conference quote Joyce's line from this play--what did you do in the Great War, Mr. Joyce--as actually said by Joyce. And however historically inaccurate might be, it feels like something we all want Joyce to have said.
Having myself attempted to bake souffles is the only reason I'd call this play souffle-like: that is, potentially light and fluffy, but in the end excruciatingly difficult to pull off. I came to Stoppard myself through student productions--Arcadia will always be seared into my heart. As with Rosencrantz last week, though, this production made me realize how difficult Stoppard actually is to do. For this to work, the actors have to work on at least three levels, and in multiple modes: everyone coming on to dance must do so at least as well as (say) Tzara talking in two accents, one heavily Eastern European and the other entirely in the mode of West End Oscar Wilde. Etcetera, etcetera, and with dancing. Everyone in this production, top to bottom, did everything that was asked of them excellently.
During the performance, what rang with me particularly were the exhortations to traditional European culture. If one were interested in reading list on conservative art, in the non-witless sense of "conservative" we don't get much of at the moment, one might do worse than to stick this play on it. But then the piece is subtler and cleverer than that: Carr, who gets the biggest speech about art, is (at least) a bloody racist; Tzara, whose anti-art musings seemed to get slightly short shrift in this production, is nevertheless also the portrait of a Wildean dandy. Even Lenin's cultural tastes get a few moments of sympathy, in between descriptions of the purges. There is, finally, something immensely generous in the play's attitude towards Joyce. Ulysses is barely in Travesties, but also everywhere alongside it, the greatness of its revolution--unlike most other things in the play--taken for granted. Ulysses, more than the Alps, is the mountain behind Stoppard's Swiss confection; I can think of no lovelier tribute of one artist to another.
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