‘ART FOR ART’S SAKE!’ is without doubt a slogan to conjure with. And sure enough, that irrepressible conjurer/playwright Tom Stoppard (left) twirls Théophile Gautier’s 19th-century notion – that art is defiantly non-utilitarian – around his bewitching wand again and again during the newest revival of his Travesties (back on Broadway since last week).
Not that Gautier actually makes an appearance this gymnastic exercise in philosophy-on-the-boards from 1974 (not to be confused with Stoppard’s previous Jumpers, which was quite literally acrobatic – and specifically centered, amid much athletic jumping, on a professional philosopher). No, Gautier is absent here (though his beliefs are not), and instead we have to be content with three later historical figures, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara all showing up at the same time – as they actually did – in 1917, and in Zurich.
They are all linked by a much less noted figure, Henry Carr – a junior British consular officer. However – to be pedantic about historical facts, the real Henry Carr is known to have met only Joyce. The other two, the Russian revolutionary and the Dadaist poet/disrupter, are not on record as having ever met each other, or Carr, or Joyce. No matter – Stoppard deliciously co-mingles them all into a kind of absurdist caper, some madcap tomfoolery that might even, conceivably, have been one of the Dadaists’ Cafe Voltaire cabaret evenings. To render it even more absurd, and frolicsome, the plotline is borrowed in large part from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
It is Tzara the Dadaist who most evidently evokes Gautier and his reflections on the role of art, though unsurprisingly only in the most contrarian way. After all, it’s his mission, and that of his fellow cultural revolutionaries, to be “anti-art”.
More sharp angles of contentiousness about art’s purpose get highlighted as Travesties’ kaleidoscopic action turns. It’s all so wittily combative as to suggest that – whatever art may have to do with it – it certainly sounds a lot like ‘argument for argument’s sake’.
Stoppard himself, deprecatingly or not – I’m not sure – recently described this play to The New Yorker simply as an “intellectual entertainment.”
I remember seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s original London production at the Aldwych Theatre, and being put off by an audience who seemed to be competing among themselves to demonstrate – by loud braying, mostly – just how many arcane allusions they spotted, and how cleverly funny they found them. I think I was over-influenced by my chortling cohort, and for years I sidelined Stoppard’s work as high on intellectual brilliance and low on emotional heft. Until, that is, along came his Arcadia and The Invention of Love in the 1990s, which fully tore at the heart, even while mercilessly tickling our fancy.
For this current production, Stoppard and director Patrick Marber (also a playwright, most notable to me for the coruscating Closer) have trimmed the text and in places re-ordered it. And in a way I don’t recall from before, the play is invested with the grinding pain of real life, for all our very human efforts to lighten that pain with humor, irony, and yes, sheer cleverness.
THERE’S A STRINKING scene-and-mood change in Act One, introduced musically by soft singing of World War One’s popular and fatalistic soldier-song: “We’re here because we’re here because …”
Carr, the ever-unreliable narrator, played both young and old by a beautifully controlled Tom Hollander (below, right), switches from fierce invective aimed at Tzara to a monologue of piercing pathos (- Carr has been invalided out of the war with a bullet in his leg, to eventually enjoy diplomatic comfort in neutral Switzerland). And the pathos still, notwithstanding its depth, is etched with all the Stoppardian cross-hatching of irony, satire, and smartness:
“The dawn breaking over no-man’s land – Dewdrops glistening on the poppies in the early morning sun! The trenches stirring to life! … “Good morning, corporal! All quiet on the Western Front?” … “Tickety-boo, sir!” – “Carry on!” – wonderful spirit in the trenches – never in the whole history of human conflict was there anything to match the courage, the comradeship, the warmth, the cold, the mud, the stench – fear – folly – Christ Jesu!, but for this blessed leg! – I never thought to be picked out, plucked out, blessed by the blood of a blighty wound – oh heaven! – released into folds of snow-white feather beds, pacific civilian heaven!, the mystical swissticality of it, the entente cordiality of it!, the Jesus Christ I’m out of it!
Such mood-swings are handled skillfully throughout the production, with subtly attendant lighting and musical punctuation. Only some (deliberately jarring, I guess) hectic dance sequences are disappointing. These don’t have the tautness of the cast’s verbal dexterity – which thankfully never fails.
It’s hard – especially as the evening ends on a wistful, even melancholic diminuendo – not to feel Stoppard’s own pensive presence, himself now 80 years old, reflecting back on a whole 44 years (since that first appearance of Travesties) and more. It is after all a memory play, and one told – achingly – by someone who’s losing his memory.
And the point of that sad diminuendo? As ironic of course as Stoppard can often be, it’s in the form of a traditional three-part joke. There are three things to remember; one, two … and … I forget.
Let’s face it. That’s no travesty. That’s just life.
‘Travesties’ runs at the American Airlines Theater until June 17, 2018 – and has been (only a week since opening) nominated for 4 Tony awards.
