The Theater: Dance of Words

TRAVESTIES by TOM STOPPARD

This is a tinderbox of a play blazing with wit, paradox, parody and, yes, ideas. It is exhilaratingly, diabolically clever. The bloodline of Wilde and Shaw is not extinct while Tom Stoppard lives.

The playwright's fancy was taken by the fact that three revolutionaries of vastly differing temperaments and persuasions lived contiguously in Zurich during World War I. They were Tristan Tzara, Rumanian poet and founder of Dadaism, James Joyce and Lenin. There is no evidence that they ever met each other, but in Travesties, they do. Stoppard was further...