Who Are the Dadas of Travesties!

Who Are the Dadas of Travesties? MARGARET GOLD • TOM STOPPARD'S LATEST full-length play, Travesties, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company first in London (June 1974) and then in New York (October 1975), is a theatre-piece that meditates upon its own dramatic origins and at the same time dramatizes questions concerning the proper relation of politics to art. The stylistic and thematic ventures proceed in tandem, as Stoppard harks back to the plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. He defines his most serious concerns against theirs and raids their arsenal of techniques and characters. Glittering in borrowed finery, he creates a distorted likeness of their plays called travesty. And in so doing he writes a new chapter in the history of the comedy of ideas. Initially a small germ of fact allows Stoppard to bring together bourgeois and revolutionary, political leader and artist for one evening on a single stage. James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara were all in Zurich at the time of the first World War. Fact even conspired to give Stoppard his bourgeois hero, one Henry Carr, a minor official at the British Consulate in Zurich at that time. Carr, it seems, acted the role of Algernon in a production of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest staged by James Joyce. Stoppard claims that Carr appealed to him as a means for using the actor he wanted the play to be for, John Wood. Stoppard's account is that: Originally, Travesties was a play about Lenin and Tristan Tzara. I knew what Lenin looked like, so John had to be Tzara. Then I discovered that 59 60 MARGARET GOLD Tzara was a small dapper man so I had to find another way. When I discovered that James Joyce was also in Zurich, John was Joyce for a while. I hadn't written a word. Then I was reading Richard EHmann's biography of Joyce and I came across this Carr figure. He's tall! So I wrote a play about Carr. Gods being gods, I said, if he was tall, John could play him. As it turned out Mrs. Carr is still alive, and she sent me a photo of her late husband who I thought I invented. He did actually look like John. I It must, however, be at least as true that in Carr Stoppard discovered the slightly pathetic and immediate focal point recognizable in his plays from the George Riley of Enter a Free Man (1968) to the George Moore of Jumpers (1972). As Stoppard told an interviewer when he was still writing Travesties, "I write out of my experience as a middle-class bourgeois who prefers to read a book to doing anything else."2 In addition to seizing upon Carr when he found him in Ellmann's biography of Joyce, Stoppard picked up the idea of using the Oscar Wilde play Carr appeared in as a skeleton for his own play, doubtless in line with T. S. Eliot's observation that while immature poets may borrow, mature poets steal. It was also, of course, a technique that had already worked very well for Stoppard (in a more straightforward way) in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). What the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest initially supplied to Stoppard's play was its two young lady characters, Gwendolen and Cecily. Between them they manage to create plot links, plausible enough at least in the context of farce, to draw the disparate crew of characters together. The young ladies cement the chummy relationship of Carr and Tzara, since Tzara is in love with Gwendolen, who is Carr's sister. Carr, meanwhile, is in love with Cecily, who is Tzara's friend. Gwendolen , Carr's sister, is employed as a secretary to Joyce, while Cecily searches out volumes in the economics section of the Zurich library for Lenin, whom she passionately admires. Given a device like manuscripts in identical folders which become confused, the characters inevitably meet, aided in this case by the additional time-tried mechanism of the play within a play. If all this sounds frivolous, an audience still ought not to lose...