Stoppard’s gripping brain-boggler returns
Theatre Travesties Apollo Theatre
‘It may be nonsense,” says the Dadaist philosopher, Tristan Tzara, to the British consul, Henry Carr, in Tom Stoppard’s 1974 brain boggler, “but at least it’s not clever nonsense.” Except that this is a Tom Stoppard play and one thing’s for sure: in the world of Stoppard, even the nonsense is very clever indeed. For who else but Stoppard could mine such erudite mischief from the farcical events in this Rubik’s Cube of a play, which pivots on Carr’s real-life attempt to sue James Joyce for the cost of a pair of trousers that Carr had worn in Joyce’s amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich in 1917?
Patrick Marber’s revival, starring TV favourite Tom Hollander ( Rev, The Night Manager) as the now elderly Carr, reliving his highly unreliable memories of the affair, was a massive hit at the Menier Chocolate Factory last year and always a sure-fire contender for a West End transfer.
Not that the play is an easy sell, exactly, being both a puckish pastiche of Wilde’s comedy and a rambunctious exploration of the value of revolutionary art, involving walk-on parts not just for Joyce and Tzara but also Lenin. Oh, and there are extracts from Ulysses and scenes written in limericks while, to add to the purposeful chaos, Hollander’s befuddled Carr, trussed up in a dressing gown like Wee Willie Winkie, is occasionally a bit hazy on the details.
Stoppard’s main interest here is in the competing value systems of art and commerce and whether art can be a greater revolutionary force than politics. In exploring this, the play takes ostentatious delight in its own unabashed intellectualism, but Hollander’s performance anchors its cerebral posturing in the realm of actual human experience. Carr is a man shell-shocked by his time in the trenches and, for all his passionate defence of the idealism behind that conflict, traumatised by what, in the end, it was all for. Will there be lines, even perhaps entire scenes that pass you by? Almost undoubtedly. Yet Marber’s finely calibrated revival gives a champagne effervescence to the densely plotted exchanges on Marxism, capitalism and the like, while the performances throughout are blissful. Freddie Fox blends exuberance and precision as the flamboyant Tzara, while Clare Foster is very funny as the hearty, frisky Cecily. And Hollander finds an aching sadness in Carr – a fantasist prone to seeing his life as a three-act drama in which he always has the starring role.