Travesties by Tom Stoppard
American Airlines Theatre, Wednesday March 11, 2.00pm
The set was beautiful and the actors didn’t miss a beat, but there was something oddly archaic about this production despite Stoppard’s witty writing and still relevant observations about the relationships between art and politics. Perhaps it was the grandeur of the half-empty theatre, or the predominantly grey-haired audience but the play’s form, which I once experienced as innovative, seemed so old-fashioned, which is not surprising given that the play is around 45 years old.
The conceit remains compelling: an old man, Car, a minor official in the British consulate in Zurich, unreliably recalls an incident from the dim, distant past involving Tzara, Joyce and Lenin and a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in which he starred. The 3 important historical personages apparently all lived in Zurich during the time before the Russian revolution, and Stoppard uses this odd coincidence to interrogate various aesthetic and political theories: is art merely an elitist bourgeois practice that inflates its own sense of importance? Is the artist a charlatan or genius? Does chance and circumstance have as much to do with artistic creation as skill and craft? In short, is the whole aesthetic enterprise a mere travesty?
I’ve always wanted to see the play on stage in order to see how Stoppard’s approach to representing the fallibility of human memory works on stage (he repeats scenarios with key variations in language, accent and power relations). The production executed this aspect of the text clearly, and I felt engaged throughout the performance. However, I left the theatre with the overwhelming impression that I’d just witnessed a lecture on aesthetics. A complex, witty and deeply thoughtful lecture, but a lecture nonetheless. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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