Word: lenin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...NIKOLAI LENIN...
...teacher. In 1929 he traveled to Moscow for the Third Communist International, where he jousted verbally with Stalin, Trotsky and Molotov. This temerity won him two months' detention; Wolfe's disillusionment with totalitarianism soon followed. He turned to historical examinations of Communism, including his classic study of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, Three Who Made a Revolution (1948), which has been printed in 28 languages...
...first act involves Carr, Gwendolyn (Katharine McGrath), Carr's sister and a Joyce patron, Joyce himself (played by James Booth), and Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist artist. While on orders from London to keep an eye on the Bolshevist Lenin, Carr finances Joyce's theater troupe in a performance of Ernest, for which Joyce promises him the lead role. After the opening library scene, the lights dim and the spotlights come out on Carr, an old man in a housecoat who sets the scene and reminisces about the old days in Zurich. The play, but especially this scene, showcases the talents...
...second act is not as good, not as quick or as funny, tacked on as if Stoppard also needed to catch his breath. For one thing, he finds himself caught in his extended metaphor on The Importance of Being Ernest. For another, the second act is more concerned 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...