Tom Stoppard’s Travesties opened on Broadway in 1975 after premiering in London the year before and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play. This revival is also a transfer from across the pond and stars a highly comical Tom Hollander. He plays Henry Carr, a British man who reminisces about his time in Zurich in 1917 during the first World War. Three important personalities were living there at the time: James Joyce writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara founding the Dada art movement and Lenin plotting the communist revolution. All three are skewered mercilessly.
Our narrator’s memories, however, are dimmer due to age and senility. The story, like our memory, goes around and around, and is never quite reliable. Apparently Mr. Carr was also in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest during this time. As a result, his reminiscences are, shall we say, structurally influenced by that play.
The trick to enjoying this play is to let it come right at you and not get hung up on specific intellectual factoids that did have some audience members cackling. This production is rich in excellent performances in an extremely funny high octane staging with superb physical hijinks competing with over-the-top verbal wordplay. As directed by Patrick Marber, Travesties is an unfussy, intellectually stimulating joyride. There’s a little cheat sheet handed out before the show with a few fun facts about these men. If you don’t know what Dada is, you will be helped. If you know even a smidge, you will laugh and laugh.
That laughter is largely due to an exceptionally strong cast, notably Seth Numrich playing Tristan Tzara. His entire performance is physically loose yet precisely calibrated. He’s in love and not only with himself and his art. Somehow he was overlooked for a Tony nomination again, the last time being his extraordinary work as the lead in 2012’s Golden Boy. A completely different performance and equally terrific.
I have to add that Sara Topham and Scarlett Strallen were hilarious in their roles as Cecily and Gwendolen. It’s not necessary to know that these two characters are both named after and reinterpret a scene from Oscar Wilde’s play. That’s icing on a fairly delicious cake.
What is art? What is good art? What does art do for society? Travesty the word is defined as a false, absurd or distorted representation of something. Travesties the play is definitely absurd and highly entertaining.