Word: stoppard
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Travesties by Tom Stoppard and The Bewitched by Peter Barnes, are both currently playing in London, and will likely reach these shores before too long...
...Stoppard's plays are situation comedies. He's always managed, in the past, to set things up at the beginning in an immediately interesting and inherently funny way--taking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their Hamlet context and making an existential comedy out of their dislocation; writing the ultimate parody of a murder mystery play and having his onstage critics sucked into the action in The Real Inspector Hound; creating a Professor of Moral Philosophy who tries to disprove Zeno's paradoxes of motion with a real hare and a real tortoise in Jumpers. Up till now, formulas like these...
...premise Stoppard devised for Travesties is perhaps the most surefire of all his plays. Zurich in 1916 was the wartime refuge of such interesting people as James Joyce, Lenin, Krupskaya (Lenin's wife), and the Rumanian dadaist Tristan Tzara, all of whom Stoppard brings together onstage (they never met in real life). All the ingredients of a fine intellectual comedy are there, but Stoppard fails to make them gel. The problem is the character he chooses to be his catalyst: Henry Carr. In real life, Carr, a British consul in Zurich, once sued Joyce to recover some money...
Travesties' first act is full of the kind of wordplay, witty repartee and the name-dropping of ideas that has always been Stoppard's strength in the past. It's a lightweight world of drawing room comedy in which the foursome of Carr, Tzara and their English girl-friends gets itself confused with the foursome of Wilde's play. Tzara explains how he discovered the word "dada" and Joyce is good for a couple of show-stopping limericks, but things never get off the ground. Some of the minor characters are better drawn, such as Carr's butler, who oversees...
...Stoppard is particularly drawn to playwrights who shake up an audience's habitual patterns of thought. That is one reason he admires Harold Pinter: "Pinter invented something-not the poetry of ordinary conversation that he is usually credited with, but the notion that you do not necessarily believe what people tell you in a theater. Formerly you did so, unless there was reason for skepticism-as in an Agatha Christie play. In Pinter's plays there is no surface reason for not telling the truth, but he has persuaded an entire generation of theatergoers that people...