Comment: I will probably dislike it too when I see the play on early May. Maybe this article will help a little.
THE THEATRE APRIL 23, 2018
Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” Comes to Broadway
The playwright’s 1974 work defends the purpose of art as an activity that can grant a sliver of immortality.
American Airlines Theatre | 227 W. 42nd St. | 212-719-1300
Cynthia Zarin
Illustration by Mikkel Sommer
The playwright Tom Stoppard was in town recently, to see previews of his 1974 play, “Travesties.” The drama is set in Zurich in 1917, and, amid Stoppard’s layered, brilliant verbal erudition, it defends the purpose of art as an activity that can grant a sliver of immortality. Central to the action are James Joyce, the poet and Dada founder Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin—all of whom landed in Zurich during the First World War—and a production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The revival, directed by Patrick Marber, originated in London in 2016; it opens on Broadway, at the American Airlines Theatre, on April 24.
Stoppard, who looks younger than his eighty years and carries with him what Marber calls “his kingly bonhomie,” was dressed in an Oxford shirt and a tweed jacket and pants. He took a bite of his eggs and said, “It’s the job of the artist, to exploit connections.” And then, smiling: “You see, I speak on behalf of the world of the artist without hesitation!” He continued, “People don’t realize that the part of the playwright is finding something for people to talk about. If you are writing about a historical episode, or two characters in Hamlet, you have a structure for free.”
“Travesties” is narrated by Henry Carr, a real person who worked for the British consulate in Zurich during the war. When he first addresses the audience, he’s an old man in a dressing gown, recalling dazzled days; in the main matter of the play, he is a young man. When Stoppard wrote it, he was closer in age to young Henry. Now, almost fifty years later, I asked if seeing “Travesties” was like looking through the other end of a telescope. “If I’m involved in a production, it always feels in the foreground again,” Stoppard said. He went on, “Patrick made suggestions so radical I personally wouldn’t have thought of making them, but I’m grateful. For example, he said, ‘It’s a great shame that Lenin doesn’t put in an appearance in the first act.’ And I said, ‘Hard luck, he doesn’t,’ and we left it there. Unlike with a new play, when I’m in rehearsal all the time, in a revival, especially with someone like Patrick, I go away and come back. So the next time I fetched up at the rehearsal there was Lenin in Act I, and he was playing a lute!”
I asked Stoppard why the characters don’t talk much about the First World War. “Don’t they? Well, it’s not really about that,” he said. “The play is a kind of luxury, in which you pretend that James Joyce was there in Zurich at the same time as Lenin and Tristan Tzara. It’s a kind of intellectual entertainment.” He paused. “It’s something I wanted to write about at the time. That’s not altered. It feels alive. In a subtle way, one is watching and listening as if it is a laboratory experiment.”
It’s an experiment that yields new results. A recurring trope of the play—one of ten or so things that Stoppard investigates—is what to do about the news. “Anything of interest?” Henry Carr asks, each morning, when his manservant brings in the newspapers—a line that a New York audience greeted last week with exhausted laughter
