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Home , After Magritte, Dalliance, Enter a Free Man, Indian ink, In the Native State, On the Razzle (play)

The writer and director

Specific learning outcomes Students will: • understand the process of developing this script. • examine how a scene in the play has been developed by the director. • understand the writer’s purpose in developing this play • understand and be able to describe the features of Stoppard’s writing • identify key ideas in the play.

[These learning outcomes relate to the Communication and Interpreting in Drama (CI) and Understanding Drama in Context (UC) strands in The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum.]

Tom Stoppard

“If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.”

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on 3 July 1937 in Zlín, . Stoppard’s father, Eugene Straussler, was a company physician whose Czech company sent the family to a branch factory in Singapore in 1938/39. After the Japanese invasion, his father stayed on and was killed in a prisoner of war camp, but Mrs Straussler and her two sons escaped to India, where she married a British officer, Kenneth Stoppard, in 1946. At the age of nine, Tom and his family went to live in England. Tom Stoppard (he assumed his stepfather’s surname) quit school at the age of 17 and started his career as a journalist in Bristol. He began to write plays in 1960 after moving to .

Travesties: The writer and director, page 1

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Stoppard’s bibliography of plays, radio dramas and film scripts is extensive. He has also worked as a script doctor and re-written (uncredited) on various Hollywood films, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).

Stoppard’s life and personal relationships have been a matter of public record. They have included two marriages, one to a well-known English celebrity doctor Miriam Stoppard, and a very public affair with actress . Stoppard was awarded the CBE in 1978 and was knighted in 1997.

Travesties is the third Stoppard play that Auckland Theatre Company has staged in the past five years, after in 1997 and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 2001.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 2

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Trademarks of Stoppard’s plays

Stoppardian as a theatrical term has been defined as “an innovatively structured theatrical extravaganza filled with a plethora of jokes and puns, conflicting arguments, intellectual inquiry, elaborate allusions, and cerebral wit”.

A Stoppard play tends to overflow with ideas – philosophical, scientific and literary. Tom Stoppard is noted for his idiosyncratic style, artful and complex construction, deft parody, wide-ranging knowledge, and ability to find significance in wordplay and bizarre juxtapositions of language and character.

The plots tend to be difficult to pin down in terms of “beginning-middle-end” summations. He possesses a playful attitude towards time and space. Most of his plays are episodic and rarely follow a linear direction. In Travesties it is quite impossible to follow and put the events into correct order. In fact, Stoppard has admitted that he has problems thinking of stories: “Every one of my plays is flawed by this. I have to exert myself enormously to construct a story and then tell it properly.”

With plot or without, all his plays contain a great deal of humour. Puns, allusion, word play of all kinds keep audiences alert and amused. As Stoppard himself once said about his love for words, “I really dig words more than I can speak them. There are no words to say how much I love [words].”

Stoppard’s dramatic work is considered to be post-absurdist in the sense that “he appropriates the spirit of absurdity rather than the technique”. He introduces on the stage either a seemingly straightforward story or an absurd situation, each arousing different expectations in the spectator. In Travesties, Joyce, Lenin and Dadaist , each with their particular modes of literary or political discourse, are incongruously packed together within the Wildean medium of high comedy. By a theatrically contrived juxtaposition of realistic and absurdist elements within the framework of the same play, Stoppard shakes our firm stand as to what is to be considered “realistic” or “absurd”. (See definitions in the box below.)

Stoppard also utilises Bertolt Brecht’s epic techniques (verfremsdungeffekt or “alienation effects”). By interrupting our involvement in the plot of the play (by use of song, dance, time structure or even limericks!) he allows the audience to maintain a distance that serves to hinder emotional involvement and invites intellectual response. Brecht maintained that, in order to avoid the spectator’s automatic perception, the playwright had to show him familiar things in an unfamiliar way. (Brecht used the term “making strange”.) The aim is for the spectator to perceive it as if for the first time. Stoppard’s plays challenge the way we see things.

Stoppard has been labelled jokingly as a master plagiarist due to the fact that a good number of his plays have intertextual ties with master works. In intertextualising his texts (inserting lines from other plays), Stoppard certainly owes most to Shakespeare. Two of his plays which use Shakespearian works as a base are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Dogg’s .

These can be enjoyed without a thorough knowledge of the text of Hamlet, but it would be a pity to miss the links between Shakespeare’s tragedy and Stoppard’s plays. Travesties has intertextual ties with Shakespeare as well as ’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 3

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Overall, Stoppard aims at involving his audience in an intellectual activity while also producing an entertaining show.

Absurdism Works of dramatists who share a similar view of the futility of the human existence. They believe that this condition can be shown only in plays that are absurd. The ideas behind the plays are allowed to dictate the dramatic structure. Despite their dislocated language, illogical plots and intellectual seriousness, the plays are often comic. Well-known absurdist drama includes the Monty Python films.

Realism A theatrical movement of the late 19th Century, in which artificiality of style was replaced by a naturalistic depiction of real life situations and characters. This idea revolutionised contemporary theatre.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 4

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties So, what’s it all about?

Understanding all the nuances placed in the work undoubtedly enhances the enjoyment of a Stoppard play. Travesties is mainly concerned with artists and their relationship with the world in which they live. It is one of Stoppard’s basic assumptions that the artist creates a world of his own, and, to an extent, lives in it as an alternative to the real world.

In Travesties we have two artists, Tzara and Joyce, with very different approaches to their life and . For Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist, art is a revolutionary act in itself, breaking down our usual assumptions about the world, and art:

TZARA (TO JOYCE) You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all the rest. It’s an overripe corpse and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses: Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!

For , art is justifiable for its own sake, operating on a level above political or social revolution:

JOYCE As an artist, naturally I attach no importance to the swings and roundabouts of political history.

Lenin is a third voice in the argument, asserting that art is only valid as an aid to political revolution. Each character’s attitude is reflected in the way in which he uses language:

LENIN Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non- partisan literature. Down with literary supermen. Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social Democratic mechanism.

TZARA dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada.

JOYCE Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

The arguments about the relationship between art and society are one level on which the play functions. More importantly, we are given an overview of the whole problem, and here Stoppard uses the stage to dramatise a concept – by the fact that we are seeing the events of the play through the distorting medium of Henry Carr’s memory.

Henry Carr, a genuine historical figure, is somewhat overshadowed by the notoriety of the men around him and his opinions are often overlooked. Yet the debate occurs within Carr’s memory, and the play makes it clear that the events presented are highly coloured by Carr’s remembering them. Indeed, Carr’s introductions of each of the other three participants in the debate emphasise their status as products of his memory – “James Joyce As I Knew Him”, “Lenin As I Knew Him”, “Memories of Dada by a Consular Friend of the Famous in Old Zurich: A Sketch”.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 5

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties We are reminded that Carr is the narrator by the repeated “time slips”, in which a scene is played two or three times, but slightly differently each time as Carr’s memory plays tricks on him. The egocentric Carr’s best memory of the war years in Zurich is that he played a leading role in Joyce’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, thus the events of Travesties are structured around the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest.

There are many intertextual references between the two plays – some obvious and some subtle: Cecily, Gwendolen and Jack are all characters in The Importance of Being Earnest. The confusion over the swap of folders echoes the swapping of the handbag in Wilde’s play. Algernon and Jack stop to eat muffins in The Importance of Being Earnest, just as Carr does. Stoppard even borrows lines from The Importance of Being Earnest, only slightly changed for inclusion in Travesties:

LENIN To lose one revolution is unfortunate. To lose two would look like carelessness!

LADY B To lose one parent is unfortunate. To lose two would look like carelessness!

The play takes its title from the fact that Carr’s memory tends to oversimplify the characters he met, and hence they are often seen as travesties of themselves. For example, in one scene the dialogue falls into the form of limericks, and in another into the form of question and answer, which travesties Joyce’s techniques in . The point of this is that, while Joyce, Tzara and Lenin are each “living in their own world, asserting that their view of reality is more valid than the others”, the whole picture presented to the audience is itself only Carr’s view of reality.

For the first few minutes of the play not a single sentence of comprehensible English is spoken. Tzara is picking words from a hat, Lenin is speaking Russian, and Joyce is speaking the language of Finnegans Wake. To the audience it is incomprehensible nonsense, until Henry Carr arrives on stage to begin his narrative. The implication suggested by this dramatic technique is that “objective reality” is incomprehensible without somebody there to comprehend it; and the person comprehending reality will distort it according to personal interpretation or ability. The logical implication of this is that we all live in our own private reality. We are our own narrators, and we distort reality just as Henry Carr does. Our attempts to re-create or assert our view of reality will be more or less a travesty of objective reality.

It is interesting that Stoppard’s final statement on this theme rests on a concept of “relativity”; that “reality” is relative, depending on the observer. As the play ends, Old Cecily completely disagrees with all the Carr has been asserting, reminding the audience that, however convincing Carr’s arguments may have seemed, the situations that stimulated them never really occurred.

OLD C No, no, no, no it’s pathetic though there was a court case I admit, and your trousers came into it, I don’t deny, but you never got close to Vladimir Ilyich… You never even saw Lenin… And you were never the Consul.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 6

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Tom Stoppard’s bibliography

Theatre Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: A Play in Three Acts (1967) (1968) (1968) (1970) (1972) Enter a Free Man (1972) Travesties (1974) Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976) The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1976) Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1978) (1978) Dogg’s Hamlet; Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) (1979) Night and Day (1980) (1981) (1982) : Freely Adapted from Ferenc Molnar’s Play at the Castle (1984) (1986) (1988) Arcadia (1993) (1995) (1997)

Television scripts A Separate Peace (1966) Teeth (1966) Another Moon Called Earth (1967) Neutral Ground (1968) The Boundary (1975) Three Men In a Boat (1976) Professional (1977) Squaring the Circle (1984) Poodle Springs (1998)

Radio plays The Disolution of Dominic Boot (1964) “M” Is For Moon Among Other Things (1964) If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank (1965) Albert’s Bridge (1967) Where Are They Now? (1970) Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) (1982) (1991 – later the stage play, Indian Ink)

Screenplays The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) Despair (1975) The Human Factor (1980) Brazil (1985) Empire of the Sun (1987) The Russia House (1991) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)

Travesties: The writer and director, page 7

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Billy Bathgate (1991) (1998) Enigma (1999) Cats (pending)

Fiction Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon (1965) Misc. Short Stories

Useful websites http://www.nybooks.com/articles/390 http://www.stage-door.org/authors/stoppard.htm http://homepage.dtn.ntl.com/wellfurlong/theatre/stoppard.htm http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/stoppard.htm http://www.curtainup.com/stoppard.html

Other resources ATC Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A Teaching and Participation Kit for Schools. 2001.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 8

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Raymond Hawthorne

Raymond Hawthorne

Raymond is one of New Zealand’s most senior and prolific theatre practitioners in most areas of the discipline. In 1955 he joined the New Zealand Players, under the direction of Richard Campion, and acted with the company for two and a half years. Granted a New Zealand Government Bursary in 1957, Raymond studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), London. After graduating, he remained in the United Kingdom for thirteen years working as an actor/singer and director/teacher, including returning to RADA to teach acting and to direct.

In 1971 Raymond returned to New Zealand and worked for two years at the Mercury Theatre under the directorship of Anthony Richardson. In 1974 he instigated the formation of Theatre Corporate, of which he was Director for eight years. An appointment as Director for the National Opera of New Zealand followed in 1982, and in 1985 he commenced his seven-year tenure as Director of the Mercury Theatre. 1992 saw him establish his own acting studio – The Actors Space – of which he was Director for five years. During this period, and since, he has worked as a freelance director and actor and, in November 1997, was appointed Head of Directing for Screen and Live Performance and Screen Arts at UNITEC – a position he still holds.

For Auckland Theatre Company, Raymond has directed Lovelock’s Dream Run, , Three Tall Women, The Herbal Bed, Julius Caesar, The Wind in the Willows, Cabaret and Into the Woods (Best Production 2000). He has acted in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Oleanna, Travels with My Aunt, and The Judas Kiss (Best Actor 2000).

In the 2000 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Raymond was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to the Theatre.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 9

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Interview with Raymond Hawthorne

Why did directing this play appeal to you? I have never directed Stoppard before and, although I had seen many productions of his plays, I’d often felt diffident with the nature of his literary approach to the narrative flow.

I continue to wish to explore my craft and the nature of all types of theatre literature. Travesties presents arguments on the nature of Art – the politics of the early rise of Socialism is a subject that interests me. The work on this play has re-enforced this interest.

What has been the biggest challenge? To enable the actors to feel free enough to articulate with fluidity and ease, the complex, yet always reasonable, arguments that Stoppard presents. My endeavour has been to clarify for the audience’s ears an appreciation of Stoppard’s splendid language and sensibility; to make what might seem nonsense, coherent.

How did you structure your rehearsals? I started with two read throughs of the play (I thought the play demanded this), then a period of detailed exploration and discussion of Act One and Act Two over a period of two weeks. This left two weeks to revise, re-think and re-discover the play.

I began runs of the play early on. This was to facilitate the lighting designer (Vera Thomas) to see the play as a whole. It also provided a sense of continuity and flow for the actors and staff.

How closely do you work with the production team (the designers, stage manager, production manager)? These collaborative relationships are vital for the overall delivery of the play – for the audience’s clear understanding as to the nature of the play. Tracy Grant, as designer, met with me for some in-depth discussion on two or three occasions in the pre-production period, where we discussed our vision for the play and how we wanted it to be viewed/ perceived by the audience. This was an extremely harmonious and constructive process.

Interface with Vera Thomas (lighting design) quickly followed and we shared with her, and she with us, a collaborative vision for the play’s presentation and technical requirements. Interface with T.O. Robertson (production manager) and Phil Evans (stage manager) was much more interactive during the process of rehearsals.

Tom Stoppard said in 1988 “The main difference is that in films the writer serves the director, and in the theatre the director serves the writer – broadly speaking”. Do you agree that it is your job to “serve” the writer and the text, or do you follow your own inspiration? All my inspiration for a vision for the production comes from an instinctive and considered study and knowledge of the text. This is the same in the spheres of film and theatre. However, we all do acknowledge that the director’s job is to serve the playwright’s ideas and manifest a visual concept and style that will enable the writer’s ideas to resonate for the audience’s better understanding of the author’s intention.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 10

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties One convention used a great deal by Stoppard is that of repetition of Carr’s memories. How have you, as a director, marked the repetition of ideas and thoughts? For example, in the beginning of Act One where Bennett’s line, “Yes, sir. I have put the newspaper and telegrams on the sideboard, sir” repeats in the stage action four times, and then briefly in Act Two. [See pages 19-21.] Certain technical devices in the ATC production denote Carr’s lapses of memory. You will identify these very easily. They are: • smoke drifting across the stage to recapture a sense of “no-man’s land”; • the fluttering of paper leaves by a wind machine that is a reflection of his memory; • explosions to denote the memory of war, which sparks these lapses of memory; • detonated paper bombs that add potency to his memory lapses and define the changes. With the repetition of “Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir”, it has been left entirely to the actor’s skill to connect Bennett’s comprehension of Carr’s lapses.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 11

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties

The writer and director: classroom activities

Classroom activities have been developed specifically for:

Working on with a class prior to viewing the play

Working with a class after viewing the play

Associated activities using resource material generated by the play

Mr Stoppard, I presume? (worksheet)

Read the biographical information and articles about Tom Stoppard.

Use the information to complete the table listing important influences on his writing below.

Influences Details Personal i.e. childhood, life experiences

World i.e. historical and political events

Travesties: The writer and director, page 12

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties

Use of role to convey ideas in the play (worksheet)

Stoppard has chosen the characters of Tzara, Joyce and Lenin, and Henry Carr as a narrator as vehicles for his ideas about art and life. From the notes on page 5-6, fill in the table below outlining the ideas represented by each character. You may wish to add your own notes after watching the play.

Character Represents the following How do we know this ideas in the play James Joyce

Lenin

Tristan Tzara

Travesties: The writer and director, page 13

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Exploring a scene (activity)

One of the features of Stoppard’s writing is the use of repetition. The scenes titled “Time and News” and “Tzara’s Entrance” are examples of the repetition of lines of dialogue to begin an action sequence.

Read the scenes through as a class, and then divide into groups to develop the scenes. You will need three students for “Time and News” and six students for “Tzara’s Entrance”. One student from each group will act as the director, the others will take on the character roles.

The actors should read through the scene and familiarise themselves with the lines. They should consider the use of voice, gesture, movement and facial expression in the scene. The director needs to read the scene and decide how each phase will be played, to communicate the differences between the sequences. Note your ideas on the script. The director and actors should then rehearse the scene and present it to other class members.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 14

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Convention detective (worksheet)

As a class, brainstorm the use of dramatic elements and conventions that you saw in the play, and the effect that they had on you as an audience.

Consider why Stoppard choose to use them to get his message across. Record your ideas in the table below.

Elements and conventions Effect For example: Old Henry as narrator Flash back Repetition of scenes Use of rhyme and song Dream/surreal scenes

Travesties: The writer and director, page 15

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Realist or absurd? (activity)

Aspects of Stoppard’s writing are described on pages 3-4 as realist and absurd. These terms were defined as follows:

Absurdism Works of dramatists who share a similar view of the futility of the human existence. They believe that this condition can be shown only in plays that are absurd. The ideas behind the plays are allowed to dictate the dramatic structure. Despite their dislocated language, illogical plots and intellectual seriousness, the plays are often comic. Well-known absurdist drama includes the Monty Python films.

Realism A theatrical movement of the late 19th Century, in which artificiality of style was replaced by a naturalistic depiction of real life situations and characters. This idea revolutionised contemporary theatre.

Clarify these terms with your teacher. As a class, discuss which aspects of the play were realistic and which were absurd. How did you find this mix?

Travesties: The writer and director, page 16

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Tzara’s approach to script writing (activity)

You will need : • a copy of a scene/page from the play • scissors.

In the play, Tzara cuts up a Shakespearian sonnet to create a new Dada poem, saying that “all poetry is a reshuffling of a pack of cards”. Reshuffle the lines of this play to create a scene of your own using this same principle.

• In small groups, cut up the lines from one of the scenes. • Randomly select 5 lines of dialogue – these will be the starter for your scene. • Read them through several times and decide where the scene could be set, who the characters are and what could happen in the scene. • Continue to develop the scene by choosing more lines and building them into the scene. You are only allowed to use the words from the original scene as your dialogue. You will need to use action, tone of voice and facial expression to convey your ideas. Remember that the meaning of a line can be completely changed by the way it is delivered. • Rehearse your scene and present it to the other members of your class.

Travesties: The writer and director, page 17

Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties