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 intrigued by a suit filed against Joyce by one Henry Carr for the price of a pair of trousers. A minor British consular official, Carr had purchased the trousers to play Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest for a Joyce-managed troupe called the English Players.

Exile, to some degree, is Stoppard's abiding theme. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is exile through ignorance. The two mini-heroes do not understand Hamlet or Elsinore. Junipers is exile from God. No one can clearly divine his purposes or verify his existence. Travesties is exile by intent, a rebellion against social traditions and aesthetic norms. Travesties, a play-within-a-monologue, begins with the age-frazzled Carr (John Wood) reminiscing intimately about the famed Zurich trio in a way that illustrates a perennial travesty: the ravages of time on memory. What follows is part vaudeville, part nonstop debate and part instant replay of Wilde's play with absurdist variations.

Joyce (James Booth) appears wearing a jacket with shamrocks on it, spouts limerick after limerick and intermittently becomes Lady Bracknell. Tzara (Tim Curry) comes on with a pair of scissors, slices up a Shakespeare sonnet, dumps the lines into a top hat, and extrapolates them as gibberish to show that antiart reigns supreme. In the Wildean substructure of Travesties, Tzara doubles as John Worthing (Earnest in town-Jack in the country). Carr once again plays his friend Algy. Lenin (Harry Towb) has no role in Earnest. Isolatedly aloof, he delivers a stinging diatribe on the duties of an artist in a workers' state, but later tearfully melts at the playing of Beethoven's Appassionato.

Stop-motion devices, relished by Stoppard, telescope, bisect or reverse the flow of time. The sound of a cuckoo clock, which Stoppard treats as the Swiss national anthem, periodically suspends the action, and the same opening lines of dialogue lead into an entirely different episode. One scene has Joyce arguing that no one would have been remotely aware of the Trojan War had it not been for Homer, a dozen other artists, and his own upcoming Ulysses. Scarcely a word is uttered without a play on it. A few of the puns are punishing, but most of the word play is daffily delicious, as for instance, "My art belongs to Dada."

In an evening that is a dance of delight, and thanks to Director Peter Wood an astute lesson in the choreography of thought, there is only one segment that falters with a portentous sobriety. At the beginning of Act II, Lenin's long monologue with its didactic fervor disrupts the tone of what has preceded it and makes it a bit difficult to get back into the partygoing mood of the rest of the play.