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| Me watching Travesties |
'Travesties! When the feeling's gone and you can't go on, it's Travesties! When the morning cries and you don't know why...' The last Tom Stoppard play I saw was Arcadia, about fifteen years ago, which I didn't enjoy on the grounds of it being pretentious and difficult to follow. I was concerned I would have a similar reaction to Travesties when I read the blurb on its advertising leaflet: 'With all the pithy wit of Joyce and the literary virtuosity of Wilde, the political rigour of Dada and the absurdity of Lenin - Travesties is a whirlwind tour through politics, art and really great trousers. While the Great War rages across Europe, Zurich in 1917 is a battlefield of ideas and ideals. [...]'
Anything that has the words 'Joyce', 'literary virtuosity', 'Dada' and 'battlefield of ideas and ideals' in its description has GOT to be pretentious, right?
Well, not necessarily, but this play certainly was.
I liked its basic concept: elderly man called Henry Carr (performed here by a Bruce Forsyth lookalike) reminisces about his younger days when he lived in Zurich, and the influential people he met. As he reminisces we see his reminiscences played out. However, his memories are faulty and sometimes confused, and there are times when the same basic memory is played out more than once but in slightly different ways. An interesting concept. The people with whom Carr interacts are James Joyce, Tristan Tzara (a founder of Dadaism) and Lenin. Carr played the part of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest while in Zurich and his memories are closely intertwined with this play.
The thing that annoyed me about Travesties - and Arcadia, too, as far as I remember - is that one's enjoyment of it depended almost entirely on whether one understood its myriad of social, political and literary references. In this case you had to have a reasonably intimate knowledge of The Importance of Being Earnest in order to understand half the script. Fortunately I happened to have seen TIoBE and listened to a radio adaptation of it recently [smug look] so I think I scraped a pass on that score. However, in order to wring the most enjoyment out of this play you would also have to have a good knowledge of Joyce, Ulysses, Dadaism, contemporary Russian politics...and probably a load of other things that I'm too goshdarned pig ignorant to even be aware of. Confession: I'd never heard of Tzara before seeing this play and it wasn't until the second half that I realised he was based on a real person, like Joyce and Lenin (yes, I had heard of them [wipes brow]).
There were some parts that I found amusing, such as Carr's love of clothes even while fighting in WW1, but didn't find anything laugh-out-loud funny.
My dislike of the play aside, Travesties was performed admirably by the Tower Theatre Company, a well-known amateur group. It wasn't an easy play to perform, requiring a good sense of rhythm, especially in the poetry scenes. Now I have a better knowledge of some of the characters I'm impressed by how well the actors copied their appearances. The costumes were great, hairstyles impressive. The set was excellent. It was good to see consecutive sets containing divans!
Next: I don't know. Nothing by Tom Stoppard, though. For another fifteen years.
I liked its basic concept: elderly man called Henry Carr (performed here by a Bruce Forsyth lookalike) reminisces about his younger days when he lived in Zurich, and the influential people he met. As he reminisces we see his reminiscences played out. However, his memories are faulty and sometimes confused, and there are times when the same basic memory is played out more than once but in slightly different ways. An interesting concept. The people with whom Carr interacts are James Joyce, Tristan Tzara (a founder of Dadaism) and Lenin. Carr played the part of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest while in Zurich and his memories are closely intertwined with this play.
The thing that annoyed me about Travesties - and Arcadia, too, as far as I remember - is that one's enjoyment of it depended almost entirely on whether one understood its myriad of social, political and literary references. In this case you had to have a reasonably intimate knowledge of The Importance of Being Earnest in order to understand half the script. Fortunately I happened to have seen TIoBE and listened to a radio adaptation of it recently [smug look] so I think I scraped a pass on that score. However, in order to wring the most enjoyment out of this play you would also have to have a good knowledge of Joyce, Ulysses, Dadaism, contemporary Russian politics...and probably a load of other things that I'm too goshdarned pig ignorant to even be aware of. Confession: I'd never heard of Tzara before seeing this play and it wasn't until the second half that I realised he was based on a real person, like Joyce and Lenin (yes, I had heard of them [wipes brow]).
There were some parts that I found amusing, such as Carr's love of clothes even while fighting in WW1, but didn't find anything laugh-out-loud funny.
My dislike of the play aside, Travesties was performed admirably by the Tower Theatre Company, a well-known amateur group. It wasn't an easy play to perform, requiring a good sense of rhythm, especially in the poetry scenes. Now I have a better knowledge of some of the characters I'm impressed by how well the actors copied their appearances. The costumes were great, hairstyles impressive. The set was excellent. It was good to see consecutive sets containing divans!
Next: I don't know. Nothing by Tom Stoppard, though. For another fifteen years.
