Word: tristan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
While at Harvard and in Cambridge, productions are using adaptations of other forms of art, in Boston, Travesties is stealing from life itself. Not literature or film but history is re-written when Lenin, Tristan Tzara, the Dadist and James Joyce meet in a library in Zurich. Their fictive joint story is told by a character who himself re-writes the story as he goes along. Tom Stoppard's scintillating play, studded with allusions to the radicals' works, which never did as well in New York as it deserved, is playing at the Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, beginning...
...monologues allow a cross-indexing of various aspects of love: lust, friend ship, disinterested affection, good will and gratitude. Edward Henley's antiseptic Don Juanism is a calculated mockery of the mythical passions of a faithful Tristan. Stephen Henley, too, has anesthetized his emotions, by marrying a companion and choosing a church that prizes rationality more than faith...
...Brunnhilde's dilemma here, and certainly Lohengrin's. These similarities would not much matter if the music had independent life. Instead, the score is a shameless pastiche, something that Erich Korngold, the peerless artificer of movie music, would have deeply appreciated. Wagner (including an outright steal of Tristan's theme for Roland), Meyerbeer, Offenbach, all emerge from the pit. The vocal music is lifted mostly from Berlioz, who wrote wonderfully sensuous love duets. The pity is that in Manon, Massenet created an ineffable erotic style...