It’s a Travesty: Travesties and the Tony
When I was first introduced to Tom Stoppard’s brand of puckish wisdom with Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead my ears pricked up like a puppy’s — a new master had moved into my neighborhood. We have a tradition in my family to see a play for my birthday, and several Stoppards were among them — Indian Ink,The Real Thing, Hapgood in Williamstown, and the Invention of Love on the telly. Each had its moments, and for me Arcadiais a great masterpiece. Thomasina is waltzing forever in a corner of my mind.
And then there was this year’s production of Travesties. I’ve tried to keep mum, but four Tony nominations? Well, it’s a travesty! Before hapless theater lovers are snookered into buying seats, I am not happy to report that the play is a sophomoric, empty exercise from start to finish. Tom Hollander’s opening shaggy prologue is brittle and cartoonish, and the character he later plays is a pompous buffoon. How many Kiplingesque, colonialist Englishmen must we see before it’s clear that we’ve gotten the idea?
Although Hollander has been nominated for a Tony, his performance is never more than loud and sly. And the revival is likewise nominated, but why revive Travestiesat all?
Stoppard, a very young man and an apprentice playwright when he penned this, gets something of a pass. He’s an artist perfecting his tricks — the postmodern juxtapositions, historical analogies and admixtures of fleeting pathos and silliness. He will use his entire basket of devices to great effect in subsequent works. But here? We have a sad exhibition of irrelevance.
And not only irrelevance, but sour superiority. In this play the smug, superior Englishman is on display. Stoppard tells a true story almost a hundred years old involving James Joyce and a lawsuit, the excuse being the coincidence of Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and Henry Carr, our less known protagonist, all living in Zurich following World War One, a slim pretext for a play. Stoppard steers into shoals here. His Joyce is a prig not the smarmy, prurient Joyce of his writings and letters. Lenin is coarse, and Tzara is a cringing organist’s monkey.
The postmodern contribution of Stoppard’s technique is the ongoing use of parallels and references to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of BeingErnest. Indeed, the two women on stage are ciphers borrowed from Wilde, right down to their names. Wilde’s play is a trifle, but that was his point — the glittering surface that implies that something lurks beneath. A superficial satire of a trifle? Where is its beating heart?
The Stoppard play dismisses women, laughs at the deadly excesses of the Russian revolution, winks at Wilde’s libel trial, and misunderstands Joyce. Its snorting derision of the overly exuberant Tzara becomes stabbingly painful if we remember that he was persecuted for being a Jew. I imagine Stoppard wrote this play before he discovered that he himself is a Jew.
And then the women. Where are the women artists? Stein? Woolf? Not living in Zurich so here women must be mere decorations. The real juice here (if there is any juice) is in the kind of philosophical debate we’d expect in an undergraduate philosophy class — Marxist-Leninism, Dadaism, and modernism duking it out while anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia hide in favor of another tired send-up of a comical, colonial Englishman.
Stoppard may get a pass for his callowness. After all, he moved on from such empty exercises. But the producers, the mirthful audience, and the Tony Nominating Committee? You don’t get a pass. If we are talking about the fraught period between the two world wars or our present moment when culture is imploding, shouldn’t the subjects marginalized by the play be front and center? Isn’t the pathos of Wilde’s destruction (as opposed to the inconsequential lawsuit explored here,) the tragedy of the silencing of Jewish voices, and the continuing fight of women to avoid being relegated mere patrons of libraries, as they are here, more gripping than the petty fraternity house disagreements of strutting white European men? Although I am a fan of both Toms, Hollander and Stoppard, I will not be rooting for them on Tony night.