A frivolous risk well worth taking
Travesties (Apollo Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue) Verdict: Tomfoolery with 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 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 first opened last autumn. Stoppard’s play is a two-and-a-half hour virtuoso turn, and Patrick Marber’s production, which stands on the virtuoso turns of his actors, does not disappoint.
Tom Hollander, as the Bertie Woosterish Carr, is hardly ever off stage. A veteran of WWI, 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 Joyce to appear in a play, discovering a sympathy for Lenin’s ideas of class struggle, and wooing a librarian.
Peter McDonald as Dubliner Joyce is a hoot, firing off limericks clad in never-matching clothes, while Forbes Masson plays a magisterially selfimportant Lenin. All find time for some vociferous disputes with the Romanian Tzara about the nature of art. If that last bit sounds too arch, then Freddie Fox damn near steals the show with an exultantly histrionic turn as the radical Dadaist.
It may have lost some of its political edge since first appearing in the Iron Curtain era, but on Tim Hatley’s ingenious set this is flamboyant tomfoolery with panache.