Word: zurich
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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...
...little studio called the Funny Face Shop. In the quarter-century since La Strada made him famous, Fellini has never stopped "doodling," as he calls it -turning out thousands of sketches of his actors' faces, costumes and wigs. Unbeknownst to him, some friends organized a show at Zurich's Galerie Daniel Keel with the drawings Fellini leaves scattered on the cutting-room floor...
...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 was. Never said I was, Carr retorts. But again he tells us, sure, knew 'em all. Three things I learned in Zurich: You're either...
...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...
...only 38, still a young playwright, and Travesties must be looked on as an early work of genius. But it is genius, nonetheless; someday we may wonder why and how Stoppard went on, while the rest of us teach, work, play, lie in the cemetary up the hill in Zurich or under glass in the Kremlin...