Tomfoolery with a pinch of panache
One of the greatest risks you can run in theatre is being too clever for your own good. It’s a risk Tom Stoppard has been taking for most of his professional life — and nowhere was the gamble greater than in his 1974 comedy, Travesties.
The story, about Henry Carr, an amnesiac official at the British consulate in Zurich of 1917 crossing paths with the great Irish novelist James Joyce, the founder of the Dada art movement Tristan Tzara and the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, is almost unfathomable.
And yet you don’t need a degree in english, art or Russian history to get you through this brilliantly frivolous production, which sold out in a flash when it opened at London’s bijou Menier Chocolate Factory last autumn.
You don’t even need an acquaintance with Oscar Wilde’s comedy The Importance Of Being earnest, of which it is a loving parody, though it would help.
A woman behind me confided to her companion, during the interval, that for the first five minutes she thought ‘Oh, my God!’ And it’s not plain sailing after that, either. But you soon realise you’ve just got to let go.
That’s exactly what the cast, led by Tom Hollander, do in Patrick Marber’s dazzling revival. Stoppard’s play is a two-and-a-half-hour virtuoso turn, and Marber’s production, which stands on the virtuoso turns of his actors, does not disappoint.
Hollander, as the Bertie Wooster-ish Carr, is hardly ever off stage. A veteran of World War I, he is most concerned by the impact of the trenches on his trousers. now, in Zurich, he finds himself at the mercy of his clever, champagne guzzling butler while being importuned by James Joyce to appear in a play. In between, he finds time for some vociferous disputes with the Romanian Tzara about the nature of art. And if that last bit alone sounds too arch, then Freddie Fox damn near steals the show as the radical Dadaist. Orotund and gymnastic all at once, it’s as though Laurence Olivier is reborn. Peter McDonald is a more purring presence as the Dubliner Joyce, with his never-matching jacket and trousers. He is a hoot, firing off limericks and literally pulls a rabbit out of his hat in another dispute about art.
Marber has him strum a guitar at one point, just as he has Forbes Masson’s magisterially self-important Lenin play the lute to a Shakespeare sonnet.
There are delicious touches, too, from Clare Foster and Amy Morgan as Cecily and Gwendolen in The Importance Of Being earnest sub-plot about tea, muffins and missing manuscripts. When it appeared in the Seventies, with eastern europe still labouring under totalitarian communism, Travesties was a much more risque work.
It may have lost some of its political edge, but on Tim Hatley’s ingenious set ( a cross between a library, a courtroom and a drawing room), its flamboyant theatricality is given full throttle. This is tomfoolery with panache.
MAnCHeSTeR Royal exchange is hosting a fascinating production of Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s tale of sexual repression The House Of Bernarda Alba. This production by the pioneering disability theatre company Graeae reinvents the drama as a disturbing parable of cultural isolation.
Kathryn Hunter crackles as the megalomaniac mother who imposes eight years of mourning on her five hormonal daughters following the death of their father.
In Jenny Sealey’s austere production, the focus is squarely on the acting, with deaf or disabled performers sharing sign language for each other and surtitles on screens overhead.
While this can be distracting, they add to the sense of being trapped in another dimension.
Jo Clifford’s habit of making characters repeat what speechimpaired performers say makes the action seem laborious. But it also gives an elemental tone.
Clearly this is not everyone’s cup of sangria, but if you can give it the benefit of a doubt, it’s a strangely unnerving experience.