Word: carres
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...interesting proposition--Joyce and Lenin in Zurich together in 1918--and Stoppard runs with it. Seeing Travesties is like getting on a runaway rollercoaster of one-liners, reminiscences and digressions. The play careens wonderfully through history and facts. John Wood, as the protagonist Henry Carr who knew Joyce and Lenin, is simply magnifificent; Stoppard wrote the play with him in mind. The other actors are at least competent, but dim in the light Wood casts. Although the serious theater-goer may say this isn't drama--too flashy, its characters lacking in depth--it is a fascinating and entertaining evening...
...strength of the play is in the first act. Carr's friend, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara drops by for tea. Carr gets an explanation of anti-art, says Dada in Zurich is the high point of European culture-topographically speaking-and proclaims, "My art belongs to Dada!" But the best scene is a confrontation between Joyce and Tzara, who is hard at work cutting up volumes of poetry, putting the scraps in his hat, and drawing them out randomly to create anti-poetry. Joyce has come to borrow money for his English Players, but stays to argue with Tzara...
...says Carr, as the spotlights pierce through the sudden darkness to pinpoint the tottering old man, "in the witness box, case practically won, and I flung at him: 'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?'" The first act ends; the audience catches its breath...
...with Lenin, ably portrayed by Jack Bittner. But the speeches he gives are Lenin's own, and political bombast is only amusing in a very bourgeois sense. The act moves to conclusion inexorably picking up speed, and unifying it with the first act is Wood's tremendous performance as Carr. Finally, the end comes, and Carr and the woman he married a long time ago in Aurich waltz stiffly onto the stage. Carr reminisces about Zurich, Lenin, Joyce--knew 'em all, he tells us smugly. No you didn't, says his wife, you weren't even consul. Somebody named Percy...
...Dadaist in him-art for art's sake, and all-and something of an E.M. Forster English traditionalist. But revolutionary potentialities excite him, as they do most of the rest of us most of the time, and this keeps him from sliding into a morass of pity for poor Carr or bourgeois stupidity. Stoppard evidently created the play out of two lines in Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, which mentions a certain Henry Carr of the Zurich consulate who later is mentioned unfavorably in Joyce's Ulysses. Immortalized after a fashion-the travesty of life...