About The Book

Travesties was born out of Stoppard’s noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century’s most crucial revolutionaries—James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin—were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consular official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholly riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.

Excerpt

Act One

The play is set in Zurich, in two locations: the drawing room of Henry Carr’s apartment (“THE ROOM”), and a section of the Zurich Public Library (“THE LIBRARY”). Most of the action takes place within Carr’s memory, which goes back to the period of the First World War, and this period is reflected appropriately in the design and the costumes, etc. It is to be supposed that Old Can has lived in the same apartment since that time.

The ROOM must have the main door Centre Upstage: most of the entrances would be weakened seriously if they occuned from the side. Double doors would be best. However, there is also at least one side door. There is a centre table with a good chair on each side, and a side table, apart from other furniture.

The LIBRARY suggests a larger scale—tall bookcases, etc. In Act Two Cecily (the librarian) requires a counter or desk, which need not necessarily be in view at the beginning of the play. Some of the entrances, e.g. Nadya’s, are probably through a door rather than from the wings.

Praise

“Mind-bending splendor . . . a prismatic text . . . The hilarity comes fast and frequent throughout.”—New York Times (2016)

“[A] brilliantly zany, effervescently erudite comedy about writers, artists, and revolutionaries holed up in neutral Zurich during the First World War . . . Stoppard crafts what is at once a hilarious riff on The Importance of Being Earnest and a playful, poignant memory play.”—New York

“A gushing waterfall of wordplay, a fine-tuned literary torrent that only begins by covering love, sex, war, memory, and Marxism. Also James Joyce, Dada, the fine art of men’s tailoring, and The Importance of Being Earnest.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Set during World War I in Zurich, the famously neutral city that in 1917 counted among its residents author James Joyce, revolutionist Vladimir Lenin and poet Tristan Tzara, a founder of the freethinking artistic movement known as Dada. Only a playwright as brilliantly inventive as Stoppard could put all that together to come up with an uproarious work that seriously questions the nature of art.”—Newsday

“Both a zany celebration of wit and theatrical verve, and a deeper meditation on the purpose of art, the responsibility of artists, and the nature of genius.”—New York

“[R]azzlingdazzling effervescence of language that erupts and bubbles throughout the evening . . . It is as iridescent as a rainbow glimpsed in a dirty puddle and almost as surprisingly elusive . . . It is also a play that is clever, adroit and, partly because it succeeds so well in being both, ultimately moving . . . It is so pleasant to go to the theater for once when the entertainment offered is not just illuminating, but is actually dazzling.”—New York Times (1975)

“Travesties provides a cultural guidebook to the post-Great War zeitgeist as seen through the eyes of a playwright who, like Wilde, interweaves the classicist and the clown.”—Chicago Tribune

“The external brilliances in Travesties, its manic virtuosity of language, its diabolical manipulation of time and notion, cannot elude any visitor to Tom Stoppard’s achingly funny verbal prank . . . It’s brilliant, stunning, a miracle!”—New York

“Travesties is a brilliant, theatrical masterstroke. Crunchingly witty with a thousand laughs and nine hundred thoughts.”—Newsweek

“A knockout! Travesties is a brilliant, dazzling play.”—New York Daily News

“Travesties glows as Tom Stoppard’s best.”—New York Post

“[Travesties is] a Dadaist collage, a word-drunk dance and a political argument . . . [it] is also a frothy comedy of manners . . . a real achievement . . . dazzling.”—Washington Post

“Travesties is an intellectual tease, a perfect mind-bender of a play.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Has there ever been a more genially erudite entertainment than this manic gloss on The Importance of Being Earnest, this nutty disquisition on politics and war and, most especially, art? I think not . . . The real fun of this play is in the details, the vaudeville routines that not only punctuate the script but often, in uncanny and inexplicable ways, advance it.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“A dazzling pyrotechnical feat that combines Wildean pastiche, political history, artistic debate, spoof reminiscence, and song-and-dance in marvelously judicious proportions. The text itself is a Joycean web of literary allusions; yet it also radiates sheer intellectual joie de vivre, as if Stoppard were delightedly communicating the fruits of his own researches.”—Guardian (UK)

“Tom Stoppard’s Travesties is witty, playful and wise. Forty years on, it is starting to look timeless as well.”—Sunday Times (UK)

“It is a champagne cocktail, compounded of a balletic nimbleness of invention, a bewildering intricacy of design which reaches the sublime heights where mathematics merge with poetry, and the audacious juggling of a master conjuror.”—Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“Exuberant, extraordinary jeu d’esprit . . . an intellectual workout on a dramatic trampoline.”—Daily Mail (UK)

“A multi-layered confection of art, song, literature and pastiche . . . [a] dazzling intellectual pantomime.”—Spectator (UK)

“Humongously funny . . . [Stoppard has a] peerless gift for word games.”—Arts Desk

“Brace yourself. Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play achieves the near impossible. Set in Zurich, 1917, when Switzerland, or the ‘still wheel of war,’ was brimful of artists, writers and revolutionaries, it mashes together the ideas that shaped much of the last century and, at the same time, has fun. Yes, fun.”—Jewish Chronicle (UK)

“Drop-dead brilliant.”—Express (UK)

“Prime early, funny Stoppard . . . the perfect Stoppardian mix of the intellectually heavy and the soufflé-light.”—Financial Times (UK)