Word: stoppard
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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...
...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...
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...
...thought it was the way to build a reputation, but the audience got tired of me." By 1967 Wood was tired too. "I thought I'd never find a playwright whose work I liked." Then he was sent Teeth, a television comedy by an unknown named Tom Stoppard. Wood played a cuckolded dentist who turned his rival's teeth green. Shortly afterward, Wood starred on Broadway in Stoppard's first stage hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Establishment again beckoned; the RSC had asked Wood four times before he agreed to join them. To his relief...