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 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!
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