Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joseph Ziegler
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
April 17-March 21, 2009
Travesties (1974) is certainly one of Tom Stoppard’s most ingenious plays. Unlike so many comedies nowadays, Travesties is addressed to an educated audience, familiar with classic plays and with various movements in art and history. The more you know the more you will get Stoppard’s multiple punning references and jokes within jokes. The trick, however, is to balance the high level of intellectual content with farcical comedy. The current Soulpepper production which opens its eleventh season is well cast, well acted and well designed, but director Joseph Ziegler has not found the right balance to make the play work as it should.
The seed for the play is that a minor British diplomat, Henry Carr (Diego Matamoros), played the role of Algernon in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest staged in Zurich in 1917 by the self-exiled author James Joyce (David Storch). In that same year it so happened that Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (Oliver Dennis) and Tristan Tzara (Jordan Pettle), co-founder of Dadaism, also resided in Zurich. From these historical facts, Stoppard imagines the aged, brain-addled Carr of 1974 attempting to reconstruct his memories of the great men he knew in 1917. The aged Carr confuses reality and fiction so that his memory of past events becomes entwined with the plot of Earnest complete with its own Gwendolen (Sarah Wilson) and Cecily (Krystin Pellerin). To be funny it must be absolutely clear that the events from 1917 that we see are being filtered through Carr’s mind, but Ziegler has not managed this. Ziegler begins the play with a short Dadaist film that sets the wrong tone making us look for surrealism in the play’s absurdities rather than seeing them as expressions of character. Sections of the play that repeat several times, are written in limericks or in music hall style appear as stylistic aberrations rather than stutterings of Carr’s struggling memory.
Matamoros gives a wonderful performance, especially as the older Carr, his mind free-associating into triviality even as he tries to keep focussed. Storch, Dennis and Pettle all play their iconic characters with flair, though Dennis’s steely Lenin is inevitably the most imposing. Kevin Bundy is excellent as the younger Carr’s butler with a suspiciously extensive knowledge of Marxism. Through Carr and his three famous contemporaries, Stoppard keeps four theories of art and politics swirling through the air like a master juggler. It’s one of the the most intellectually invigorating comedies ever written. It ought to be just as funny as well.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-02-18.
Photo: David Storch, Sarah Wilson and Diego Matamoros. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2009-02-18
Travesties