Travesties

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 12 November 2016

This revival of Stoppard's coruscating 1974 play inspired by the coincidental presence of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Zurich in 1917 is directed by Patrick Marber and features Tom Hollander as Henry Carr, Amy Morgan as his sister Gwendolen, Tim Wallers as his servant Bennett, Peter McDonald as Joyce, Clare Foster as his amanuensis Cecily, Forbes Masson as Lenin, Sarah Quist as his wife Nadya, and Freddie Fox as Tzara.

Joyce really was the business manager of an amateur theatrical group which presented The Importance of Being Earnest; Carr (a member of the British diplomatic staff in Zurich) really did take part in the play and there was a squabble between them about finances. From this situation, together with the fact that Lenin departed from Zurich in late 1917 with the connivance of Germany to make his way to the Russia to instigate the Bolshevik revolution, and the fact that Tristan Tzara, the notorious Dadaist, was also in the city, Stoppard constructed a play in which Carr reminisces about his interactions with all three men - though it is clear that his memories are highly questionable.

The result is an extraordinary mixture of social comedy, bravura stylistic fireworks - a scene conducted entirely in limericks, a set piece of dialogue in song, a constant echoing and subversion of the speeches and situations from the Oscar Wilde play - and a passionate enquiry into the nature and importance of art. The sheer wordiness of the text is dazzling in this age of fashionably stripped down drama: Henry Carr's initial reminiscences as a stooped, possibly comic but at times still steely old man, go on for pages of script, setting the scene in a highly expository way but also revelling in verbal tricks with a cleverness that now looks almost outdated. However, in Tom Hollander's hands everything is superbly under control, the winks to the audience and the self-satisfied appreciation of some of his conceits wonderfully managed.

The cast around him rises to the occasion so that the artifice is consistently and entertainingly maintained. There is a marvellous scene between the young Carr and his servant Bennett (butler? valet? consular under-secretary?) in which the routine of laying out the morning papers is repeated many times, revealing not only political developments, but Carr's insecurity, the simmering tension between the two men, and a surprisingly articulate summary of Marxist thought from Bennett. It has affinities with the famous breakfast scenes in Citizen Kane at one end, and the repetitive phrases used in some of Beckett's plays such as End Game at the other, but here used to comic effect.

When Freddie Fox's dandified and immensely charming Tristan Tzara bursts onto the scene, there is an exhilarating sense of the energy and daring behind Dada and the surrealist enterprise, but Carr, who has until now seemed both self-indulgent and ineffectual, is able to mount an impassioned defence of art as the crown of civilisation, and to convey the sheer horror of the war from which he has been invalided out. Yet the point does not unbalance the play - with the arrival of James Joyce we are launched into another comic riff in which all those on stage manage effortlessly to speak in limericks for an improbably long time, giving us a surprisingly genial view of the great author. A later scene in which he interrogates Carr with fussily precise questions to elicit apparently trivial information is an amusing homage to one of the central chapters of Ulysses, another Stoppardian tour de force.

All the dazzling wordplay and theatrical agility is built around a completely serious debate about the nature and benefit of art, and the brilliant success of this production is to give full rein to the sheer joy of performing such a piece while at the same time taking its underlying message in real earnest. After all the high jinks, Carr's recollections - what we have spent two and a half hours enjoying - are almost crushingly called into doubt; Bennett, it seems, in an off the cuff comment all too easy to miss, was the name not of a servant but of the British Consul (Carr's boss). Carr himself remembers three things from his experience. He can tell us only two of them; the third he has forgotten, an admission of quiet resignation which brings the astonishing verbal gymnastics to a quietly sober close.