Travesties

by Tom Stoppard

'Travesties is a superb comedy, a work of thought and imagination.' Stage and Television

'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 ideas of a master conjuror.' Sunday Telegraph

'A dazzling pyrotechnical feat that combines Wildean pastiche, political history, artistic debate, spoof reminiscence, and song-and-dance in marvellously 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

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, 20th Century, Classics, British Literature

99 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful fizz of mature 70s Stoppard, this extravagantly brilliant play is, like many of his best works, sketched in the margins of existing literary history. Stoppard noticed, apparently for the first time, that Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Lenin were all in neutral Zurich at about the same time during the First World War. Travesties imagines how they might have interacted, and it does so with real brio – including one scene written entirely in limericks, another imitating a chapter of Ulysses, and several pastiches of The Importance of Being Earnest (a play that James Joyce was paid to stage for the British Council in 1917).

It had been many years since I last read this or saw it performed, and despite my happy memories of it, I had forgotten quite how wonderful it is. The central argument concerns the nature and purpose of art, a subject on which the various characters hold very different views. The fact that these discussions are taking place while thousands are being slaughtered on Europe's battlefields is very much of the essence.

My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

The speaker here is Henry Carr, British consular representative in Zurich, who anchors the play and brings the rest of the cast together. He is suspicious of Tzara's newfangled modern-art sensibilities, despite the Dadaist's attempts to explain himself:

TZARA: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat.

CARR: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art.

TZARA: I see I have made myself clear.

I could quote the whole of this scene and not run out of lines I want to share with people. As always with Stoppard, he is unique in the even-handedness of these debates: there is no sense that one character's viewpoint is ‘privileged’ as speaking for the author. Stoppard famously said he became a playwright because it was the only respectable way of disagreeing with himself, and the arguments in Travesties are a good example of this.

Joyce disagrees with Tzara over what art should be, but he makes a passionate case for its importance.

What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots.

But Henry Carr, nursing a wound he got in the trenches, is suspicious of this position too. His mistrust of Joyce – which culminates in a lawsuit – is the backdrop for probably the play's most famous line, which closes the first act:

I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him – ‘And what did you do in the Great War?’ ‘I wrote Ulysses,’ he said. ‘What did you do?’
Bloody nerve.

All Stoppard's trademarks are here in spades – the verbal pyrotechnics, the deep grounding in literature and history, the love of debate, the willingness to include crowd-pleasing gimmicks and daft jokes (‘Have you ever come across Dada, darling?’ ‘Never, da-da-darling!’), and above all, perhaps, the general questioning of certainty that characterises his oeuvre as a whole. Maybe it's not his very best play – that, I think, is Arcadia – but it might be his most Stoppardian, and it's a masterpiece of condensed thought and wit.

(Feb 2014)

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard is my favourite contemporary playwright. This is not my favourite of his plays* and the first act is much stronger than the second, but it's still a gem. In it, Stoppard takes a coincidence of history and spins it into an intelligent comedy with a serious point.

The narrative and themes come from the fact that for a period in 1917, three revolutionaries - James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin - were all residing in Zurich. They apparently didn’t meet, but Stoppard imagines a world in which they did. Or at least a world in which they might have met, for the play’s narrator, an aging minor British consular official named Henry Carr, is not exactly reliable.

In real life, Carr and Joyce were acquainted. In his spare time - when he wasn't writing episodes of Ulysses - Joyce was the business manager of a group called the English Players. With the support of the British consulate, the group put on a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. Carr played Algernon and he and Joyce ended up in litigation over the cost of trousers and tickets. This quirky footnote in Joyce’s life gave Henry Carr a place in history and role of a different kind in Stoppard’s play.

The serious point of this work is its discussion of the meaning and purpose of art. Is art meant to be revolutionary? Should art only exist for art’s sake? Is something art because the artist says it is? This theme is explored in a pastiche of The Importance of Being Earnest, a scene written in limericks, another scene written in the style of a chapter of Ulysses . It contains an abundance of Stoppard’s extraordinary cleverness with words and plenty of inspired silliness.

Although I'm passionate about theatre, I haven't really read plays since studying English and French literature at university. I would much rather see a play performed than read it. Just as songwriters write songs to be sung and composers write musical scores to be played, playwrights write plays to be performed. And although the best actors and the most receptive audience in the world can't turn dross into gold, they can give wings to words that would otherwise be flat on the page.

In spite of my reluctance to read plays, I was inspired to do so on this occasion by the fact that I’m currently reading Gordon Bowker’s biography of Joyce. Last week I reached the chapter dealing with Joyce’s experiences in Zurich in 1917. I then remembered that I’d heard this story before when I saw an excellent production of Travesties about six years ago. That was all the inspiration I needed to read the play. I’m really glad I did. It’s a lot of fun.

*That would be either Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highbrow comedy that was both smart and really funny featuring some great propulsive wordplay. James Joyce, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Tristan Tzara of Dada fame, and a play within a play - The Importance of Being Earnest. I mean, come on! Stoppard is just simply a very clever man. A playwright genius. Still preferred Arcadia, but it's a solid 4/5.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe Stoppard's best, though I speak as a play-goer, not a reader; I have read Arcadia and his Seagull, but the others I've seen on stage (in London--Travesties at the Barbican in the nineties). Arcadia, despite seeing it twice, still puzzles me, though I get the overall double plot and time contrast (maybe unique in drama, not a warren of discontinuous plots--Winters Tale excepted).
In Travesties, the three Zurich residents--two artists and a revolutionary--have plenty to say about art. Tzara says, "Your art has failed. You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all the rest," to Joyce. He also says, "I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind.."
I liked Arcadia, though I did not understand it. And I was not alone. My first time at Theatre Royal Haymarket I met a Cambridge scholar (I had his survey of lit on my shelf back in the US) who was there for his third time. Couldn't understand it.

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I started reading this, I had the impression that it would be mere cleverness. I continued reading, and it took off into a mix of dialogues and monologues on art and politics; comedy; memories; and vaudeville, all wrapped up in a take off on The Importance of Being Earnest.
It was a hoot to read and I would love to see it performed.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.


Travesties is a predictable if often funny collision of personalities, depicting the imagined encounters of Joyce, Lenin and Tzara--who all happened to be exiled in Zurich at the same time during the Great War. The play is a comedy of manners drenched in a pontification of ideas: a torrent of exposition on art, revolution, and basic utility. The play boasts a number of laugh out loud moments but the ideas being displayed weren't exactly shattering. Maybe I'm old.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travesties is not really a play at all but an intellectual vaudeville, frothier and more stuffed with factual arcana and philosophical inquiry than even Stoppard's Jumpers, to which it bears a certain stylistic resemblance. Its strength is not in its narrative (there isn't much) or characters (they're conceits), but in Mr. Stoppard's literate gags and glittering cerebral syntax, which finds or creates correspondences in the most hilarious places.

Stoppard's comedy is rooted in history here, although the roots don't go too deep. While World War I raged across Europe, a remarkable collection of uninterested or conscientiously objecting figures assembled in Zurich, in the still center of the storm: a brooding Russian named Lenin; the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara, who was fomenting revolution of a different kind, doodling up the texts that would define (rather vaguely) the Dada movement in art; and James Joyce, embarking on a magnum opus that would shake the literary world to its foundations, "Ulysses."

Mr. Stoppard's imagination was arrested by this odd footnote in European history, and in "Travesties" he created a mad tea party with all three in attendance, presided over, in memory, by Carr, a minor consular official who lived in Zurich during the same period. Carr came to know Joyce when the Irish writer founded a theatrical troupe that staged a single performance of Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, with Carr as Algernon Moncrieff.

This last, curious occurrence provides the narrative glue that holds together - just - a freewheeling romp through an encyclopedia's worth of artistic and intellectual concepts. Stoppard exploits this historical fact in large and small ways, making his entire play a parody of the plot and style of Wilde’s Earnest, and making a running joke out of one odd moment in the Carr-Joyce relationship. Unhappy with his recompense for playing Algernon, Carr apparently sued The English Players for the cost of the trousers he had purchased as part of his costume. Joyce then countersued Carr for the price of the complimentary tickets he had been given. When the dispute went to trial, the judge rendered a split decision; when Stoppard worked the moment into Travesties, by way of a frustrating dream Carr has, Joyce win hands down:
"…I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him — “And what did you do in the Great War?” “I wrote Ulysses,” he said. “What did you do?”
Bloody nerve."

Turning Wilde's subversive style on these proud subversives, to often hilarious effect, Mr. Stoppard allows his characters to intersect with actual or approximated scenes from Wilde's peerless comedy of manners. In the second act, for example, Lenin gives an inspirational oration to the masses that concludes with a swipe from Lady Bracknell: "To lose one revolution is unfortunate. To lose two would look like carelessness!"

[Kaethe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't specifically remember reading this one, but Stoppard has been my favorite living playwright since 1980 or so, making it unlikely I haven't read it. Plus it makes reference to The Importance of Being Ernest, my favorite 19th century play by my favorite 19th century playwright. But of the several pages I've read today, none are familiar as such.

I've only gotten to p 7 so far, but I expect part of why I don't remember it better is how little it had to resonate with in me lo! these many years ago. Old guy recalling people-who-later-became-astoundingly-famous that he had known in youth and obscurity? And although Lenin became literally larger than life in all those enormous statues, Joyce and Tzara have reputations, but not so much lingering celebrity.

I am currently juggling library books from four different libraries, which is so doomed to go horrifically wrong. On the other hand, my local is offering read-down-the-fines opportunities. Would it be wrong of me to force my under-age offspring into fine-reduction slavery? More to the point: would it be possible? It wouldn't work, I know. Or atleast, it wouldn't be profitable. Not while there's a library book sale going on. This is me, of course

This is purest delight: it's just Stoppard having fun, riffing on a happenstance of history. It does have something to say about memory, and aging, and how History makes liars of us all. But really, what more do you need that the idea that Lenin, Tzara, Joyce, and this other chap walk into a library...? The Cecily/Gwendolyn exchange is worth your time alone being a pretty accurate recreation of Ernest dialogue with bonus poetry! Also, some quality insults.

For best results, I recommend reading it in a library, so you can amuse yourself wondering which of the people you see around you might be famous for what some day.

Library copy

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The 2017 edition, with new authorial preface, opens with the acknowledgement that Lenin and Krupskaya's dialogue comes almost entirely from his collected works and her memoir (vii)--no such acknowledgment recurs for Tzara, Joyce, or Carr--the central figure through whose memories the play is presented, and regarding whom a prefatory note establishes historically that Carr was part of the British consulate in Zurich during WWI and that he was an actor in Joyce's theater group there--leading to lawsuits between them (ix et seq.): Joyce got his revenge against Carr by parodying him in Ulysses, apparently (x). Another prefatory essay concedes a certain brechtian willingness to being a "tinkerer in rehearsal" (v)--innovations occur there "that would not have occurred to me in an opiate dream." Perhaps the statements of Tzara, Joyce, and Carr are dreams?

The play itself moves back and forth, as though an opiate dream, between ill-defined present day moments and the first world war. Aged Carr is ironic on Joyce, "an amazing intellect bent on shaping itself into the permanent form of its own monument" (9), "exhibiting a monkish unconcern for worldly and bodily comforts, without at the same time shutting himself off from the richness of human society, whose temptations, on the other hand, he met with an ascetic disregard tempered only by sudden and catastrophic aberrations" (9-10). Regarding Lenin, Old Carr muses "an essentially simply man, and yet an intellectual theoretician, bent, as I was already aware, on the seemingly impossible task of reshaping the civilized world into a federation of standing committees of workers' deputies" (10).

Carr, a typical cappy, can't do anything for himself, and delegates even the reading of the newspaper to a servant: "'Sir, I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard.' 'Is there anything of interest?'" (14), a repeated refrain throughout the text. The servant for his part gets it, reciting news of the February Revolution as "more in the nature of a revolution of classes contraposed by the fissiparous disequilibrium of Russian society" (16), wherein 'classes' is further defined as "masters and servants. As it were. Sir" (17). Carr's understanding is a parody of Ayn Rand's unintentional parody of Marx: "anyone with half an acquaintance with Russian society could see that the day was not far off before the exploited class, disillusioned by the neglect of its interests, alarmed by the falling value of the rouble, and above all goaded beyond endurance by the insolent rapacity of its servants, should turn upon those butlers, footmen, cooks, valets" (17). The servant holds the course, explaining that "there is no immediate prospect of Socialists seizing power, for according to Marx, there is no way for a country to leap from autocracy to socialism: while the ultimate triumph of socialism is inevitable, being the necessary end of the process of dialectical materialism, it must be preceded by a bourgeois-capitalist stage of development" (18)--and so on. Nevertheless, "the Bolshevik line is that some unspecified but unique property of the Russian situation, unforeseen by Marx, has caused the bourgeois-capitalist era of Russian history to be compressed into the last few days, and that the time for the proletarian revolution is now ripe" (18-19)--which is of course hilarious. The coda to this sequence of jokes is that Carr draws a bakhtinian inference in how his servant "seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness" (19).

The old man's memory of Tzara and Joyce is defective, substituting in ethnic stereotypes for actual occurrence, setting Joyce's initial dialogue to limerick form, and so on. Tzara presents the dadaist/nihilist position: "causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war" (26), a fine self-contradictory statement. Carr agrees that the war is horrible, insofar as he "ruined several pairs of trousers" (27). He explains to Tzara that "to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich in 1917 implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus" (27). Tzara's riposte is that "an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does" (28). When conservative Carr objects to the seeming relativism, Tzara replies: "You do exactly the same thing with words like patriotism, duty, love, freedom, king and country, brave little Belgium, saucy little Serbia" (29). Carr: "the idea of the artist as a special kind of human being is art's greatest achievement" (37).

Regarding the relationship of Joyce and Carr's sister, Carr suggests that she is "scrupulously truthful," which is a bad thing because "I have known plain girls with nothing to hide captivate the London season purely by discriminate mendacity" (33)--appropriate perhaps for an association with Joyce, who is infatuated with the ancient world's most famous liar. Tzara suggests "the poor girl is so innocent she does not stop to wonder what possible book could be derived from reference to Homer's Odyssey and the Dublin street directory for 1904" (34). Tzara's appreciation of his own writing is similarly sardonic: "I was quietly improving a Shakespeare sonnet with a pair of scissors" (35). Tzara does have a point however in "As a dadaist, i am the natural enemy of bourgeois art and the natural ally of the political left, but the odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art" (36). Tzara's critique is total: "you bloody English philistine [...] it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat - grind - shit. The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art. But art created patrons and was corrupted. It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions of the paymaster. Without art man was a coffee-mill: but with art, man - is a coffee-mill" (37). He also deploys tactical malapropism: to Joyce, "For your masterpiece I have great expectorations" (39).

Joyce is no numbnut, noting that in Zurich "culture is continuation of war by other means" (41); Carr confirms this by declaiming that Joyce wants to perform The Importance of Being Earnest, which he has not read, as it is "a play written by an Irish Gomorrahist" (42). Tzara also tears into Joyce: "your art has failed. You've turned literature into a religion and it's as dead as all the rest, it's an overripe corpse and you're cutting fancy figures at the wake. It's too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist" (52) (Lenin is quoted later for his notion of hitting people in the head in the context of appreciating music (77)). Joyce has little interest in Tzara: "You are an over-excited little man with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not descreditable. Neither does it make you an artist" (53); rather "What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch?" (id.): "we stand enriched by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships - and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes" (id.).

There's cross love stories, involving Carr, Carr's sister, Joyce's assistant, and Joyce; Lenin and his wife are not involved in this, except that Carr's love interest, the librarian, is a leninist: "in the socialist future, no one will have any servants" (62) and "The sole duty and justification of art is social criticism" (63). It therefore does not help his amorous cause much when Carr tries to explain to her that "Marx got it wrong. [...] By bad luck he encountered the capitalist system at its most deceptive period" (65)--again, mendacity. She is a bit of an ultraleftist, though: "When Lenin was twenty-one there was famine in russia. The intellectuals organized relief - soup kitchens, seed corn, all kinds of do-gooding with Tolstoy in the lead. Lenin did - nothing. He understood that the famine was a force for the revolution" (66)--not the recommended course of conduct, certainly. Carr's appreciation of Lenin is that "according to Marx, the dialectic of history will get you much the same place with or without Lenin. If Lenin did not exist, it would be unnecessary to invent him" (72). Against Tzara, however Lenin and Old Carr can agree "Expressionism, futrism, cubism...I don't understand them and I get no pleasure from them" (76).

An extended multilateral agon on art and politics--perhaps the germ of an idea that needed further development. Recommended for those who watch two revolutions formed in the same street.

[Georgie]

Look, when you discover that there is a play partially set in your university's library and features Tzara, Lenin and James Joyce, then you have no choice but to read it. Highly confusing at times and used long words I'd never heard before in my life, but nevertheless incredibly funny, very clever and an absolute great time.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fun. The direction notes in brackets within the players dialogue helps to visualise the play, and also to understand its unusual time shifts while reading the play.

The verbal abuse between characters maybe a nod to, or have been inspired by the similar language in Ulysses. I was reminded of the flow of language, like on p.425 of Ulysses, "Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? ……Come on you winefizzing ginsizzing boozeguzzling existences!". Brave of Stoppard, as this makes the attempts in Travesties pale in comparison, which is not to take anything away from this great play.

Travesties touches on the unresolvable dilemma of Communist orthodoxy towards art. While rejecting Impressionist paintings subject matter as Bourgeois, they couldn't in all credibility reject the quality of the work.

I recently re-read The History of Surrealism by Maurice Nadeau which explains the dichotomy the Surrealists battled with deciding which path Surrealism should take, freedom of consciousness/unconscious mind or with a new social revolution aligning themselves with the Communist Revolution. The group split and the Surrealists distanced themselves from politics.

A lot of ideas are covered in Travesties, there's much to think about.

Hopefully one day I'll get to experience this play at the theatre.

[Kaveh Rezaie · Rating 5 out of 5]

انقدر که مسحور سبک و فرم نمایشنامه شدم، داستان را به حاشیه بردم. یک نمایشنامه پست مدرن عالی است. تمامی نمایشنامه از ذهن یک پیرمرد 80 ساله روایت می شود. یعنی ما داریم ذهن او را می بینیم. خب این پیرمرد ماجراها را با هم قاطی می کند، رویدادهای تاریخی را اشتباه می گوید، شخصیت ها را جابجا می کند و کلا هراشتباهی را که حافظه ممکن است انجام دهد را انجام می دهد و ما همه اینها را می بینیم. ما مشغول تماشای ذهن و حافظه و گاهی ضمیر ناخودآگاه این پیرمرد هستیم(هجو جریان سیال ذهن). همه اینها با چنان ظرافت و طنزی بنا شده است که لذت بردم.
جویس، لنین و تریستان زارا جزو شخصیت های داستانند و هرسه همراه با مکتب های فکری و سبک هاشان، دستمایه طنز قرار می گیرند.
ترجمه جناب احیاء هم بسیار عالی است.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG, I had forgotten (or not fully realized) how absolutely hilarious this play is! When I saw it in the theater, I must have focused on the homage to/parody of The Importance of Being Earnest because the James Joyce bits certainly were over my head then.

Brief description: Henry Carr is recalling his days in the British Consulate in Zurich Switzerland during WW1, when James Joyce, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), and Tzara (one of the founders of Dadaism) are all there. These 4 are historical figures who actually were in Zurich in 1917. In a bow to Oscar Wilde, there are also Cecily and Gwendolyn - Cecily works at the library helping Lenin write a book on imperialism while Gwendolyn (Henry's sister) is helping Joyce research Homer's Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory of 1904!! In addition to wickedly funny parodies of Dadaism, Joyce's Ulysses, and Bolshevism, the plot parallels Wilde's with the phony brother and mistaken identities.

[Faith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Except for the occasional line that is both intelligible and perceptive, this is just gibberish. I like some Stoppard, although he always insists on demonstrating that he's the smartest man in the room, but I didn't find this play accessible.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lenin, Joyce, and Tristan Tzara, father of Dadaism, hang out in Zurich during World War I, to discuss art, literature, the dawn of a new modern age, and is it (life) all absurd? These three never met each other, that we know, but Stoppard uses them for a free-for-all intellectual wrestling match. Incidentally, that dullard John Foster Dulles was in Zurich at this time too. Mercifully, we don't get his opinions.

[Nadja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite an exhausting play to read. Reading other reviews I guess this is Tom Stoppard's signature style.. The play has some interesting and mindful sentences/discussions here and there but unfortunately mostly a lot of dull nonsense. As a resident of Zurich I loved reading about the old (and sometimes known) places of my hometown the most.

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

”It may be nonsense, but at least it is clever nonsense.”

Tom Stoppard plays are funhouses crammed full of brilliant wordplay, absurd humor, and clever ideas. They bring me joy. When Stoppard died last month, I decided to use that as an excuse to read this, my fifth of his plays. I had been able to experience the other four in outstanding, LA Theater audio productions, but Travesties I had to read from the page.

The play revolves around the historical curiosity that three of the 20th century’s revolutionary giants — Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara — were present in Zurich in 1917. Though there is zero evidence that they encountered each other, Stoppard imagines that their paths converged, both in the Zurich library, and in the chambers of a rather silly, minor British official, Henry Carr, who is the play’s wildly unreliable narrator. In usual hilariously clever Stoppard style, the play contemplates the purpose and meaning of art, literature, and revolution.

* * * * * * *

”The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about. And it is the duty of the artist to jeer and howl and belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause.”
Tzara to Carr

”My God, you bloody English philistine — you constipated sack of Anglo-Saxon horse dung! When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjures the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat — grind — shit. The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art.”
Tzara to Carr

”By God, you supercilious streak of Irish puke! You four-eyed, bog-ignorant, potato-eating ponce! Your art has failed. You’ve turned literature into a religion, and it’s as dead as all the rest, it’s an overripe corpse, and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and this finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!”
Tzara to Joyce

”I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary…
I forget the third thing.”
Henry Carr

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comic drama starring the Irish modernist James Joyce, the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and other characters, set in a Room and a Library in the pacific Zurich of 1917. All three of the avant-garde, revolutionary figures are involved in their life's major work, but also bring the literature of Shakespeare and Wilde, the art trends of the period, and the contemporary political theories and relevant historical figures into the play and argue the purposes of art and literature. The last lines capture the idea of the characters' comments: "Great days...Zurich during the war. Refugees, spies, exiles, painters, poets, writers, radicals of all kinds. I knew them all. Used to argue far into the night...at the Odeon, the Terrasse...I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary...
I forget the third thing."

[Laura Leaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a play hell-bent on miracles. The writing is nothing short of brilliant. If you love words, and the linguistic gymnastics possible by those little letter-units, this is the play to read. Regardless of the intellectual pyrotechnics, I have stolen some of the simplest of Stoppard's lines for my own repertoire. One of which is below:

Gwen: Mr. Tzara!--you're not leaving? (the hat)
Tzara: Not before I offer you my poem.
(He offers the hat. Gwen looks into it.)
Gwen: Your technique is unusual.

I can't tell you how many times I've used the line: "Your technique is unusual" with people that drive me to drink.

This play is like a dry martini that can kiss you back.

[louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

[ décembre 2025 ]

I would heavily recommend reading The Importance of Being Earnest before reading Travesties because I was quite confused, but it was still extremely fun to read without the context (and probably even more so!). I probably will need a reread now that I've seen Wilde's play and I am convinced this will make my rating go higher. I loved the very long historical bits!!

L'auteur est mort pendant que je lisais la pièce ce qui fait que je suis convaincue que c'est de ma faute mais sinon c'est ok!

[Emily Fortuna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Travesties is very much a theatre-nerd's play: it is full of theatre in-jokes and references to other works of literature. While certainly enjoyable and humorous, I found as a play itself, it leaves some to be desired. Because of its in-joke-y-ness it seems like it would not be very accessible to the average theatergoer. One can certainly argue that this is the point, as much of the play examines the nature of art and to whom it is accessible, therefore the play itself is a meta-critique on art (very good Mr. Stoppard, aren't you clever). But as a play in its own right, the layers and layers of the Importance of Being Ernest and everything else did not produce a tremendously satisfying work (in my personal opinion, of course). In sum, I definitely recognize the value of what Stoppard is conveying with all this, but as a play I would see it is personally not my taste.

[Frankie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most intriguing of Stoppard's dramas, Travesties blends history with probability as the minds and works of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin clash in a madcap tale of mistaken identies.

This play retells the story of a brief production of The Importance of Being Earnest Joyce produced in Zurich, and is structured after Wilde's fascinating social drama.

Please note, this is one piece of dramatic literature that is bound to make yinses heads hurt. Mind you, it doesn't require a full bottle of ALeve like Rosencrantz and Gildstern Are Dead.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty pure Stoppard: philosophy and verbal hijinks, in this case blended for good measure with a dose of The Importance of Being Ernest. As matter of narrative, little really happens, but in between the forced interactions of The characters yields plenty of intellectual heat.

[Ben Shear · Rating 2 out of 5]

i liked it but i think a lot went over my head and it has a lot of "tricks" which i usually like but idk there is a limit i think and this pushes the limit. maybe if i was smarter i would "get" more of it and i would like it more. ill read it again later and hopefully will like it more

[Gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom is an unrivaled genius that seems to be neglected in modern literary lists. His style and examination of the heart of human existence should earn him a larger place in literary circles. I learn a lot about myself with each of his novels and Travesties is no different.

[Amir · Rating 3 out of 5]

تا حد خوبی نشان‌دهنده‌ی فضای زمان جنگ جهانی اول در سوئیس، از دیدگاهی جالب و مکانی که در حالت کلی کمتر به اوضاعش در آن زمان پرداخته شده؛ با محوریت ولادیمیر ایلیچ اولیانوف لنین و در قالب یک نمایش‌نامه
نمایشش جالب میشه...

[dead letter office · Rating 4 out of 5]

tom stoppard might be the cleverest man alive.

[Eileen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Might be better on a second, closer read. Seemed too contrived and lazy, somehow.

[Fin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I think it's genius now I can't imagine how I'll feel when I've actually read anything whatsoever that its pastiching

[Carl]

It’s hard to imagine a writer wittier than Stoppard. This play seems to prefigure his greatest achievement—Arcadia—in many ways, especially the structural (finding a slice of history into which to insert the action…leaping back and forth through time [does any artist violate the Unities more rebelliously or joyously?]…use of literary allusion), but it falls short of that pinnacle due to the meaningful but sometimes slow speechiness.

I suppose the intellectual complexity is why this (and, sadly, Arcadia) is performed so much less often than, say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound. So much of the entertainment-value depends on background knowledge: Shakespeare, Ulysses, European history, geography, political science (about which the exposition here is quite effective), and most humorously The Importance of Being Earnest, to make an incomplete list.

But I think everyone would grasp and appreciate that the core of Stoppard’s exquisite literary value depends on his ability to get us to think about art. The metafictional inventiveness in all of his works—less so in the new award-winner Leopoldstadt, though—makes him as important a postmodernist as any. It’s delightful stuff…although if you prefer your art linear and concrete, he’s not your guy.