Travesties
![[Tim Curry]](trav1a.jpg)
October 30, 1975 at Ethel Barrymore Theatre, London
closed March 13, 1976 after 156 performances.
won 1974 Tonys for Best Performance by an actor for John Wood,
Best Comedy for Tom Stoppard
won New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of 75-76
season
Borrowed from NY Times Theatre Review, author: Walter Kerr
Although Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (leading Dadaist
and apostle of the irrational) are all in "Travesties," Tom
Stoppard's play is really about an actor named John Wood.
..He'd been determined to write a play for Mr. Wood for some
time when he happened across the odd though not necessarily
meaningful fact that Lenin, Joyce and Tzara all lived in
Zurich at the same time during WWI. Sensing an opportunity
for his special brand of cerebral playfulness, and speculating
on what it might or mightn't have been like if any two of the
three had met, he first thought of turning Wood into Tzara,
though he discarded that notion upon discovering that they
didn't look alike. Wood was next to be cast as Joyce, whose
riverspill of language he'd have been so capable of managing;
no dice there, either, possible because Joyce just wasn't going
to become all that important to the verbal circus. Hence he
had no part for him, which led to the one real inspiration
that hit him, He'd give him NO part, no part to play at all,
make him a nobody at a time when the world was coming to nothing,
and let him talk a blue streak-fantastifications, furies, lies
that would make the sudden emptyness of 1917, and the
disintegration of everything from society to language that
followed the war years, blitheringly transparent on stage.
What works in "Travesties"--makes it ocassionally crackle and
always insist that you listen to it--stems from the decision.
Mr. Stoppard has got Mr. Wood up there, seedy and garrulous
in a sloppily belted greatcoat, sucking at cigarettes between
syllables though there is no room between syllables, banging
away at an already ravished piano in a red spotlight for openers,
....arguing vehemently with Tzara over the merits of shellfire
(was the war fought for the freedom of poets or for capitalism
with the Dardanelles thrown in?).....One of the occassion's most
satisfying passages finds nobody Wood and no-art Tzara (played
with smirkingly triumphant authority by Tim Curry) raging at
each other over the virtues and vices of ruin simply as ruin.
"Travesties" is not simply about Mr. Wood. He is the soloist in a splendid ensemble. Tim Curry, for example, with a comic, even prissy elegance cuts a sharp figure as Tristan Tzara looking for the right Isolde.
Read a Tom Stoppard play at your peril! He is as addictive as
chocolate and just as delicious.