Dance of Words

(2 of 3)

In a vital way, the evening belongs to an actor who can do the impossible. John Wood's performance is heroic. The torrent of words flows from his lips with impeccable delivery and phrasing, and he accents speech with stylishly funny bits of body English. He shifts between his two roles, and two ages of man, with breathtaking ease. Huddled in his bathrobe, he is a chain-smoking old codger wistfully scouring the lens es of his fogged-over memory.

As the drawing-room dandy, Carr-Algy, he is icily imperturbable as he explains to his butler that the Russian Revolution has begun be cause the Russian upper classes have lost patience with their scoundrelly, insubordinate, rapacious servants and turned on them. It may well take some time before we see another performance of such demanding tempo and such superbly controlled authority.

The rest of the cast is shadowed but valiant. James Booth's Joyce lacks some of the incisive arrogance that the character ought to pos sess, while Tim Curry's Tzara is larkily iconoclastic without quite being a cultural arson ist. In the unstable role of Lenin, Harry Towb shuttles between evangelism and browbeating. Beth Morris as Cecily, the girl who eventually marries Carr-Algy, must be nominated the minx-charmer of the cast.

But the foxiest charmer is Tom Stoppard, who has one character say: "It may be nonsense, but at least it's clever nonsense." Amen, and God bless.

"Somewhere after Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud, classical acting sank into the sands," says John Wood. "There was a generation gap. I'm trying to pick up the reins." But who is John Wood? He only joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1971, and he has spent much of his professional life in television. At 45, he is a sport among English actors. Quizzical blue eyes look out from the face of a classics don; he could not, even if he tried, roar with animal magnetism. His spirit is gentle and idealistic. His idol was the late Louis Jouvet, an actor of ineffable urbanity. From Jerry Lewis, with whom he worked in films, he learned that "there is only one response—laughter—to the most cruel, horrific thing you can imagine."

Wood and Tom Stoppard work together like the Flying Wallendas, swoops and dives perfectly matched. Travesties was written for John. "He has enough experience in his face to cover the old man, plus he is physically and mentally young enough to suggest youth and agility," explains Stoppard. Wood was not so sanguine. He is a perfectionist. Although Travesties has been in the RSC repertory for more than a year. Wood will concede only parts of it are "all right."

Like Mies van der Rohe, he knows

God is in the details. There is not a line, a move, a prop or a costume that Wood has not examined carefully nor, for that matter, a fellow actor. He confesses: "I'm forever haunting dressing rooms and saying 'what about...?'" He never stops working on Henry Carr. "It's like having ten fingers and 30 strands of silk and being told to make a sock." Unwinding after a performance is torture. Says Stoppard: "There are nights when I go backstage after what I think is a good performance, only to find John swearing and weeping and insisting that everything had gone wrong."