View source for Travesties

Play by [[Tom Stoppard]] first performed in 1974. 

An adaption of [[Oscar Wilde]]'s ''[[The Importance of Being Earnest]]'', which features a cast of influential exponents of modernist art, literature and culture (e.g., [[James Joyce]], [[Tristan Tzara]] and [[Lenin]]) as its protagonists. 

As is characteristic of Stoppard's work, the play examines artistic conventions and cultural assumptions in a highly intelligent and humorous fashion. It demands significant frameworks of knowledge to follow its various cultural and political references.

Set in Zurich during WWI, the play brings together Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, inventor of the name “Dada,” James Joyce, representing the serious nature of art for art's sake, and Vladimir Lenin who is just preparing to play his part in the 1917 Russian revolution. The action takes place in the memory of its largely fictional protagonist Henry Carr, a consular official and average English male holding conventional, middle class views of politics and art. As the play progresses Carr is revealed to be a highly untrustworthy source of information. 

The historical characters, with the exception of Lenin, are designed more to be travesties of their real counterparts than to give actual biographical portraits. 

The real James Joyce lived in Zurich between 1915 to 1919 where he was working on ''[[Ulysses]]''. There, he staged a production of Oscar Wilde's play ''The Importance of being Earnest'' and it is the plot of Wilde's play that Stoppard uses as a structural basis for ''Travesties'' - with Tzara mirroring ''Earnest'''s Jack, Carr representing the character of Algernon and Joyce that of Lady Augusta Bracknell, among others.

The portrayal of Lenin, however, is very much kept apart from the main plot and the treatment of the other characters. His presence in the play at times undermines the general lightheartedness and threatens the loss of both frameworks of the the action - Carr's memory and Wilde's play. As a prototype of a fanatical leader, Lenin is a disruptive menace in the play and his utterances are not fictionalized.

While the play opens up debates about art, communism, patriotism, war, history and memory, it offers no resolution to any of them and, instead, "remains a play in which 'Tom Stoppard Doesn't Know.' More than that, it seems to offer a comic caution against those who claim too fervently that they do" (Hunter 134).
 
----

'''
Sources:'''

Hunter, Jim. ''Tom Stoppard''. Faber Critical Guides. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

Ousby, Ian, ed. “Tom Stoppard.” ''The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English''. Wordsworth Reference. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994.