Pulling Out All the Stops

The most important question of life concerns fame-who gets it, who doesn't, and why. Some-Lenin, Joyce, for instance, go on from the murky obscurity of 1918 Zurich while others stay behind. Is it talent, luck, a combination of the two? Or is it the blind dice shaking in the hands of an angry god, rolling thunder, Jordan and sixes with equal equanimity and an uncaring laugh?

Now that, as Stoppard says, is a thought. James Joyce as I knew James Joyce, in Zurich in 1918: a myopic drunken Irishman; bloody pacifist. Or Lenin, a ripple in the seemingly endless stream of refugees and cafe plotters, writing Imperialism in the public library. Lenin as I knew Lenin. The Lenin I knew, or if memory serves, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov: short, balding, desperate to lead the revolution finally taking place in Russia. A snowball in hell-wants to turn the civilized world into a standing committee of workers' deputies. Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Travesties opens with a dark Flander's field's morning. The lights go down; sounds of booming cannon are heard, mingled curiously with birds singing. A red neon sign floats up from the stage, flashes on: SILENCE, it commands. The theatre-goers giggle nervously; Stoppard wants you to feel the tension. This is his show and you are the interloper here. The sign seems a smug reminder. The lights go up to reveal a harmless joke: the set is the public library in Zurich--I don't think you should talk during library hours, sir--especially if Mr. Joyce is over here up right center hard at work on Ulysses and Mr. Ulyanov is down left at work on revolution. But not to the public of 1918; if either man had turned to you with a warning finger to his lips in 1918 you might have laughed, or spit. Certainly you would not have been struck with awe, and this is precisely what Travesties is about-the amply mashed-in-the-face unfairness of life.

Now that's a thought. Lenin and Joyce, together in Zurich in 1918--one a revolutionary artist, one merely a...revolutionary who would remake the civilized world-or Russia, at least-into, well, a standing committee of workers' deputies. What if they encountered each other? Better yet, what if they encountered a third party, a silly fop who, like everyone else at this early stage, doesn't recognize their greatness. This is the protagonist of the play, Henry Carr, an old man retelling the story of his days in Zurich during the war, when he may or may not have been the British consul and may or may not have met both Joyce and Lenin. There is one thing he is sure of, though; he was a huge success as Ernest--no the other one, Algernon--in Joyce's production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest. At least he thinks so, but it was a long time ago, and things changed, and Joyce went on and Lenin went on and everybody went on, but Henry Carr.

The first act involves Carr, Gwendolyn (Katharine McGrath), Carr's sister and a Joyce patron, Joyce himself (played by James Booth), and Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist artist. While on orders from London to keep an eye on the Bolshevist Lenin, Carr finances Joyce's theater troupe in a performance of Ernest, for which Joyce promises him the lead role. After the opening library scene, the lights dim and the spotlights come out on Carr, an old man in a housecoat who sets the scene and reminisces about the old days in Zurich. The play, but especially this scene, showcases the talents of John Wood, who is superb in the role of Henry Carr. Wood's opening monologue is a stream of one-liners, epigrams, digressions-the saving grace of senile reminisces, he assures us-and judgements-a verbal torrent.

The strength of the play is in the first act. Carr's friend, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara drops by for tea. Carr gets an explanation of anti-art, says Dada in Zurich is the high point of European culture-topographically speaking-and proclaims, "My art belongs to Dada!" But the best scene is a confrontation between Joyce and Tzara, who is hard at work cutting up volumes of poetry, putting the scraps in his hat, and drawing them out randomly to create anti-poetry. Joyce has come to borrow money for his English Players, but stays to argue with Tzara. In a wonderful monologue borrowed from one of Joyce's early essays, the writer lectures Tzara on the duties of the artist as magician, pulls a rabbit out of his hat, smiles, bids Mr. Tzara a top of the morning, and leaves.

"I had him," says Carr, as the spotlights pierce through the sudden darkness to pinpoint the tottering old man, "in the witness box, case practically won, and I flung at him: 'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?'" The first act ends; the audience catches its breath.

The second act is not as good, not as quick or as funny, tacked on as if Stoppard also needed to catch his breath. For one thing, he finds himself caught in his extended metaphor on The Importance of Being Ernest. For another, the second act is more concerned with Lenin, ably portrayed by Jack Bittner. But the speeches he gives are Lenin's own, and political bombast is only amusing in a very bourgeois sense. The act moves to conclusion inexorably picking up speed, and unifying it with the first act is Wood's tremendous performance as Carr. Finally, the end comes, and Carr and the woman he married a long time ago in Aurich waltz stiffly onto the stage. Carr reminisces about Zurich, Lenin, Joyce--knew 'em all, he tells us smugly. No you didn't, says his wife, you weren't even consul. Somebody named Percy was. Never said I was, Carr retorts. But again he tells us, sure, knew 'em all. Three things I learned in Zurich: You're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not, might as well be an artist. If you can't be an artist might as well be a revolutionary. I forget the third thing.

AND SO Stoppard, who also authored Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has won himself another Tony. The Colonial show, a technically excellent production, is aided by the excellent cast, and in the end it's the play itself that shines, witty, exhilarating-Stoppard may be the most prolific writer of memorable epigrams in English since Pope. As for the questions he raises, there is something of the Dadaist in him-art for art's sake, and all-and something of an E.M. Forster English traditionalist. But revolutionary potentialities excite him, as they do most of the rest of us most of the time, and this keeps him from sliding into a morass of pity for poor Carr or bourgeois stupidity. Stoppard evidently created the play out of two lines in Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, which mentions a certain Henry Carr of the Zurich consulate who later is mentioned unfavorably in Joyce's Ulysses. Immortalized after a fashion-the travesty of life.

The question of whether Stoppard can write a play that relies less on epigrammatical flash and more on substance still remains, however. Stoppard is only 38, still a young playwright, and Travesties must be looked on as an early work of genius. But it is genius, nonetheless; someday we may wonder why and how Stoppard went on, while the rest of us teach, work, play, lie in the cemetary up the hill in Zurich or under glass in the Kremlin.