Posted by Jim Lindgren:
Went to see Tom Stoppard's Travesties tonight.--
Tonight I took my daughter to Tom Stoppard's Travesties (1975) at
Court Theater, the professional theater on the University of Chicago
campus. My wife stayed home, as she usually prefers to do on
weeknights. It is an extraordinarily witty play set in Zurich (mostly
in 1917) involving a supposed British consul, James Joyce, V. Lenin,
and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.
The play was evocative in odd ways:
1. I remembered the first time I saw a Stoppard play in 1971 --
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -- which was one of my first
dates with my future wife, in a hall two blocks away on the same
campus. I remember it as a thrilling evening of theater.
2. In Travesties, when the characters described a street in Old Town
in Zurich, with cafes and a red-light district, I thought about how
much more sophisticated my daughter is than I was in high school. We
had been on that street 2 or 3 times and my 18-year old daughter
remembered it well. At Stoppard's description of the Limmat River in
Zurich, she commented that he captured it exactly. She had also seen
Stoppard performed when she spent 3 weeks at Cambridge University last
summer.
3. The lines that resonated most strongly with me were [1]those when
Henry Carr, a British consul, was asking the Dadaist poet why artists
were so privileged:
[Carr to Tristan Tzara:] When I was at school, on certain
afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour - weeding,
sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that kind of thing; but
if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the
afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you've
got a chit for life? (passionately) Where did you get it? What is
an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the
work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard
who's the artist. -- Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)
I thought that was a nice image for my privileged class of lucky
bastards--tenured academics. The Matron has given us a chit for life,
which is part of what allows me to raise a daughter far more
sophisticated than I was. On the other hand, while my daughter speaks
fairly fluent FRench, she doesn't know what it was like to grow up on
a street full of kids in a safe town in the 1950s. Stoppard takes on
academic chit-holders in Jumpers, which I have a sudden desire to see.
4. In the Court Theater production, the performances and direction
were wonderful, with one exception. The James Joyce character had a
terrible Irish accent, which caused me to wonder about what the
director and the actor were up to. I Googled "accent joyce travesties
stoppard" and found that in other productions, Joyce's bad accent was
often cited as either a high point or a low point of the production. I
assume that it was intended to be broadly funny, but it somehow didn't
quite work.
But the evening did!
References
1. http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/anthonyh/quotes2005.html
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