Triumph and Travesty

Travesties by Tom Stoppard and The Bewitched by Peter Barnes, are both currently playing in London, and will likely reach these shores before too long.

All Tom Stoppard's plays are situation comedies. He's always managed, in the past, to set things up at the beginning in an immediately interesting and inherently funny way--taking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their Hamlet context and making an existential comedy out of their dislocation; writing the ultimate parody of a murder mystery play and having his onstage critics sucked into the action in The Real Inspector Hound; creating a Professor of Moral Philosophy who tries to disprove Zeno's paradoxes of motion with a real hare and a real tortoise in Jumpers. Up till now, formulas like these have served Stoppard well--his plays have uniformly been among the most intelligent, enjoyable and effective theater of the last ten years. His new failure--Travesties--currently playing in London doesn't mean Stoppard has run out of things to say, but it should convince him of the need to find radically new ways to express his talent.

The premise Stoppard devised for Travesties is perhaps the most surefire of all his plays. Zurich in 1916 was the wartime refuge of such interesting people as James Joyce, Lenin, Krupskaya (Lenin's wife), and the Rumanian dadaist Tristan Tzara, all of whom Stoppard brings together onstage (they never met in real life). All the ingredients of a fine intellectual comedy are there, but Stoppard fails to make them gel. The problem is the character he chooses to be his catalyst: Henry Carr. In real life, Carr, a British consul in Zurich, once sued Joyce to recover some money he'd spent on a pair of pants for an amateur production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest put on by the local English-speaking community and co-produced by Joyce. Stoppard's Carr is a rambling codger in a floor-length dressing gown as he tells us Stoppard's story in flash-backs, wreathing himself in cigarette smoke as he pounds out a travesty of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata whenever he wants the audience to realize he is saying something meant to be profound.

Travesties' first act is full of the kind of wordplay, witty repartee and the name-dropping of ideas that has always been Stoppard's strength in the past. It's a lightweight world of drawing room comedy in which the foursome of Carr, Tzara and their English girl-friends gets itself confused with the foursome of Wilde's play. Tzara explains how he discovered the word "dada" and Joyce is good for a couple of show-stopping limericks, but things never get off the ground. Some of the minor characters are better drawn, such as Carr's butler, who oversees Carr's non-handling of his diplomatic duties, a closet communist who's quite good at putting his master in his place. He provides the insubstantial link between the verbal minuetting of the English-dadaist group and the heavy, teutonic oratory Stoppard puts in the mouths of Lenin and his sentimental wife, Krupskaya. The one diplomatic assignment Carr receives, which he first discovers once Lenin's train is safely on its way to the Finland Station, is to make sure, at all costs, that the Russian leader does not leave Switzerland.

Lenin is the focus of Act Two. His sealed train puffs out of Zurich and into Petrograd, and we watch, through Krupskaya's eyes, his years in power. Stoppard is chiefly interested in Lenin's views on art--we hear him passionately wonder why the young people only want to see the avant garde experimentalism of Mayadovsky and not good, solid Chekhov. The only art that could move Lenin to tears in his last years, Krupskaya tearfully recounts, was--and the spotlight falls on Carr once again playing it--the Appassionata sonata.

Stoppard seems chiefly concerned, in Travesties, to explore the relationship between art and social class. The aesthetic theories associated with Tzara and Lenin-dadaism and socialist realism--are both attacks on the conventional bourgeois notion of art, though from different directions. Yet just as Tzara becomes as conventionally middle-class as a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Lenin himself is only moved by the decadent art of Chekhov and Beethoven. Joyce, perhaps, offers another angle on the problem, but one not explored much by Stoppard, who leaves Joyce as a tweedy, limerick-spouting stage-Irishman and stock anti-social artist. Stoppard should have spent less time trying to be clever in the first act and moving in the second, and produced the kind of appealing characters, sharp dialogue and thought-provoking positions on life and art that we know he is capable of from his earlier plays. As it is, Travesties stands about the lowest on any scale of dramatic values, whether conventional, modernist, dadaist or socialist-realist--botched intellectual sensationalism.

Peter Barnes' The Bewitched (also playing in London) is as much of a pleasant surprise as Travesties was a disappointment. Barnes' work plays as fast and loose with history and biography as Stoppard's and is just as funny (though its humor is soaked in pain); Barnes even manages to get away with burlesque and still wind up with a powerful treatment of issues that really matter. His centerpiece is the misshapen, epileptic King Carlos V of Spain, the pitiful result of centuries of Habsburg inbreeding. For 35 years after his accession in 1665 he was expected to die at any moment, and all Europe was armed for the struggle that would follow his death, since, in addition to his other troubles, he was importent and could leave no heirs. In his bizarre court, where obeisance is paid to a sad stick-figure of a man, Barnes finds a paradigm of all relationships based on power and authority. Carlos himself valiantly manages to hold on to the shreds of his sanity, expecially in the speeches he delivers in the interludes of calm clarity that follow his fits; the mental cripples around him are far more warped by power.

Barnes' play has a central moral lesson that he is willing to hit home with any and all means at his disposal. Some of his techniques go back to his most familiar work, the screenplay for The Ruling Class, but here he is never as heavy-handed or simply dull as he was in parts of that film. But Barnes' inspired recreation of the House of Lords, shown in The Ruling Class as a stately chamber filled with several hundred mouldy, spider-webbed skeletons madly clapping their metacarpals and rapturously singing "Dem Bones Gonna Rise", is echoed in Carlos' court by the skeleton of St. Ignatius, whose clacking about is easily translated by courtiers attuned to such things. Even when a description of Barnes' ingenuity might make it seem cliched or overdone, they are effective on stage: When Carlos climbs into his mother's coffin after her death, it makes perfect dramatic sense--he has always sought reassurance and commands from her. Even when her corpse answers back, we sense Barnes has made the right move; like nearly all his major gambles, these pay off.

His biggest risk comes at the end of the first act. One of the few things that excites Carlos sexually is seeing someone burned at the stake; his courtiers obligingly find a heretic. Carlos is aroused; from beneath his twenty-foot high royal robes emerges a golden phallus fully ten feet in diameter which extends across the stage at a stately pace until it reaches from side to side as the court sings Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

Not everything after this is an anti-climax, either. Barnes' touch remains reliably strong throughout the whole play, which runs for three long and rewarding hours, mixing burlesque, absurdist tradition, and blank verse of an elevation hardly to be found since Eliot: "Twill make a desert of this world/Whilst ther's still one man left t' give commands/And another who'll obey them," Carlos says bitterly of all authority. Barnes--if not quite up to the level of his originals--is adept at suggesting Shakespeare, Wilde and the Marx brothers, and is best at bringing them all together to make something recognizably his own. He leaves no doubts that his intentions are completely serious. All centers of power are just as sickly farcical as Carlos' court, but all are finally more sickening than funny. Carlos is too pitiful to be a traditional tragic hero, but he is in a sort of tragic situation: war will follow his death, no matter what he does to stop it. The only thing that could prevent it is the last thing in the world this congenitally ill man can be expected to do--to live forever.

No one is exempt from Barnes' curse on the powerful; everyone at the court, from the Queen's talking parrot on up, plays his or her part in the general corruption; from the torturer devoted to his craft to the amiable, worldly Archbishop; and back down to the scatalogical court washerwoman, who sniffs out royal secrets from the royal laundry--a sort of seventeenth century A. J. Weberman.

The Bewitched is a difficult play, difficult to stage and difficult to watch, with its share of rough edges. It has had an enormous success d'estime at London's Aldwych Theatre, but as you could guess it's been Travesties that's been packing 'em in. And probably when the producers and the middle men sit down to decide which new plays from London are fit for American consumption, it is Travesties that will seem the more daring, seem the more avant garde, even seem the more effective comment on moral and dramatic issues. These impresarios will be wrong, of course; both plays deal with a large part of the repertory of contemporary theatrical obsessions--history, absurdism, musical comedy, class conflict. Both playwrights are among the best working today, but this time around it is Barnes who has given us the better fare.