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Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory – great acting, not sure about the play

TravestiesREVIEW Tom Hollander's Henry Carr has just shuffled onto the stage. 'Oh it's him!' says the old lady sat behind me loudly, so loudly he could probably hear her from the other side of the stage. I stifle a laugh.

This is a play of Henry Carr's reminiscences from his stint at the British consular in Zurich during the first world war. Zurich has become a magnet for artists and political exiles and his acquaintances include James Joyce (Peter McDonald), Tristan Tzara (Freddie Fox) – one of the founders of Dadaism – and Lenin (Forbes Mason) but, as his forgetfulness suggests, his recollections may not be accurate. While Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia explores maths and science, here he explores art, war and revolution.

There is a farcical love story of sorts. Tzara fancies Henry's sister Gwendolene (Amy Morgan) but she doesn't like his radical, anarchic art movement so he's pretending to be Jack, a less radical fictional brother of Tzara's. Meanwhile, Henry fancies Cecily (Clare Foster) a librarian who is helping Lenin with research for a book. All the while James Joyce admires Lenin from afar and is trying to manage a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in which Henry will take a leading role.

Travesties is performed with such energy and verve, the delivery gunfire quick and clipped it is a skill in its own right. The performances I enjoyed very much, particularly Freddie Fox who was on fine form but I have a problem with the play. It's not the first time I've had this problem with a Tom Stoppard play in fact I'm starting to think Stoppard and me just don't get on.


Poly says he's not afraid of exploring a topic and that is true but I think it is at the expense of narrative and drama. Stoppard is obviously extremely knowledgeable and a talented writer but it feels like he is writing for a narrow audience, an audience who shares a great deal of the same knowledge he has. The cleverness and wit often only works if you are in on the joke, if you know the points of reference. As I was watching I felt like I should have done some prep, some homework on central historical characters.

When you do get a line it is like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, it is brilliant and you bask in the cleverness but there was a little too much cloud, for me at least.  What I was left with is a lot of posh characters talking very fast and eating cucumber sandwiches albeit very well acted posh characters talking very fast and eating cucumber sandwiches.

I've had similar problems with Arcadia and his new one The Hard Problem. Really liked the one production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead I saw though and I'm holding out hope that Rock 'n Roll will be another of his I like if it ever gets revived.

So I'm going to give Travesties five stars for the acting because that was the joy in watching and two stars for the play itself because it just didn't engage me. It is two and a half hours long with an interval and runs at the Menier until 19 November.

 

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4 responses to “Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory – great acting, not sure about the play”

  1. Jay avatar
    Jay

    Actually Gielgud and you appear to have been of one mind….
    From his diaries: “Am quite amazed that you liked Travesties [by Tom Stoppard] so much I really detested it – chop logic and not
    so much as a wry smile for me in the endless 1.40 hour first act after which 1 fled.”
    Intrigued by the all round wonderful reviews in mainstream press (including the usually reliable Billington in the Guardian) I tracked down a copy of the play. Three pages in, and I began to understand why Gielgud was desperate to leave the theatre…
    I wonder if it is a case of Emperor’s New Clothes? – critics and ‘theatre-goers’ being overwhelmed by Stoppard’s apparent spectacular display of erudition, and nervously wanting to avoid displaying inferior knowledge themselves?
    In one review Mark Shenton practically comes down on the side of your analysis… but then (in The Stage) seems to feel the need to lavish slightly more praise on the production.
    Definitely need to grab a few audience members and get them to explain why they liked it (and anyone using the term “verbal pyrotechnics” will be slapped until they start talking sense…)

    Reply
  2. Rev Stan avatar
    Rev Stan

    Great company to be in! A friend asked would the play even be revived if it didn’t have Stoppard’s name on it? He’s no doubt a very clever man so perhaps there is an element of wanting to be seen to be clever enough to ‘get it’. That said I think you can still be clever and have a decent narrative and sense of drama – it is theatre after all. The only play of his I’ve liked so far is R&G which the Old Vic is staging next year so I’ll go and see that but I think I’m getting to the point where I’m over Stoppard. Did you see The Hard Problem?

    Reply
  3. Jay avatar
    Jay

    Hi Rev,
    Sadly the two states of ‘clever’ and ‘pretty dumb’ can cheerfully co-exist in the same body – think ‘Two Brains’ David Willetts.
    Stoppard may indeed have great command of English language and literary history, but that just amounts to a hill of beans unless he can put it to some practical use beyond intellectual willy-waving.
    To be fair, just reading the bare text is not enough – I really should force myself to see the work on the stage – but I have yet to see any coherent explanation of why his work is worth seeing that would persuade me to part with £50+ to book a seat.
    Live drama of the highest order is able to make the audience identify with and understand the motivations of the characters they see on stage, and thereby leave the theatre in an enlightened state. From all the reviews I’ve seen of Stoppard’s work, the audience leaves ‘impressed’ rather than enlightened. Indeed, the ‘verbal pyrotechnic’ description came from a culture-vulture relative of mine over 30 years ago, and I’ve been dubious about Stoppard ever since…
    No, haven’t seen ‘The Hard Problem’ – sounds like an ordeal to be endured rather than an entertaining evening out… ;O)

    Reply
  4. Carolyn avatar
    Carolyn

    I’m of your view on this one too. It was fine, but I have to say I couldn’t follow it that much. I was greatly entertained by Peter MacDonald’s James Joyce… And Freddie Fox was great. But there’s a limit to how good acting can feel when it’s basically like the play is in some language you don’t understand. In fact, worse. In just a language you couldn’t understand you could probably get some gist interactions from body language and so on. It was just so random, to me. I couldn’t say as a play that I really enjoyed it at all.
    Interestingly, I saw The Hard Problem and had almost the opposite problem there. I loved the lights over the stage and how they linked with the music and themes (LOL – it’s saying a lot for the play that I start here) and the play was fine but I didn’t feel like the characters acted emotionally like real people enough. And although it seems hilarious to say it, I did actually get a maths degree from Cambridge (LOL “What I like about you is that nobody would ever know you went to Cambridge” someone once told me… AKA – how did that happen?! You seem so stupid! haha!) Anyway, not that I am anywhere near an expert in the specifics of the play, but I felt like Stoppard actually didn’t entirely understand the science of his subject well enough in this case for him to tie in emotion and science and thus for his play to have much substance.

    Reply

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