It's a magical world

Stoppard, Tom. Travesties. 1974.

So I went with via_ostiense and her friend M last night to see a student production of Tom Stoppard's play Travesties, which is set in Zurich in 1917 and concerns the interactions of minor British diplomat-dandy Henry Carr with a notable cast of future and current revolutionaries: Tristan Tzara, Romanian poet and one of the founders of Dada; V.I. Lenin, Russian revolutionary desperate to get back to Russia and his rendezvous with (overcoming) history; and James Joyce, Irish pacifist novelist genius already at work on the novel that would become Ulysses. Joyce at one point actually staged a production of The Importance of Being Ernest with Carr in the lead role (no, not Ernest, the other one), and the play revolves around a very old Carr's very unobjective recollections of all of them and of the times, Zurich in springtime at war, as the dogs of Europe bark, and bark, and bark. Da, da, da. Dada dada dada dadada. Dada.

I love Tom Stoppard so much. This play was new to me, but like all Stoppard it's hilarious, and obsessed with questions like what is art? and the nature of freedom and the place of art in society and who the artist is and why. This is an earlier play than most of the Stoppard I've seen so far--The Invention of Love, Arcadia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--and in some ways that thing I've sensed in some of his other works, the abyss of non-meaning, nonsense, that lies beneath his witty discourse and sometimes threatens to irrupt through--it's usually associated with politics, and especially with political nihilism of the sort practiced in communist countries--is less present here; this might be because Lenin is less present in the play than one might hope. Regardless, it's an amazing play, as usual; it took me rather longer than it should have to realize that Stoppard was entirely pasticheing scenes from Ernest into his text (as well as the usual suspects, like Shakespeare), and since it wouldn't be Dada without a food fight, there's a food fight, because it's Dada. Also, you haven't lived until you've seen James Joyce pull a rabbit out of a hat, because the artist is after all a magician.