TRAVESTIES by Tom Stoppard Remy Bumppo Theatre, March 2015 Director — Nick Sandys “Joyce, Tzara and Lenin were all in Zurich at the same time. It’s not true that they met or were aware of each other’s existence. Naturally, I had to percolate the whole thing through this man’s fallible memory.” Dramaturg — Erin Shea Brady Assistant Dramaturg — Ian Michael James Research Assistant — Kevin Boots Table of Contents I. Tom Stoppard and Travesties…….………………………..………….…………….………...….3 a. A Brief Biography……………………………………..…………………….……………..3 b. On Writing Travesties…………………………..…..………………………...…………….4 c. Other Notable Works…………………………..……………………………………….....5 d. Travesties Production History…………………..……………………...…………………..9 II. The Source Material: An Introduction a. James Joyce and Ulysses………………………...…….…………………………………. 10 b. Tristan Tzara and Dadaism………………….….………………………………………. 16 c. Lenin and the Bolsheviks……………….…………………………….…………………. 25 d. Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest………………………………….……. 32 e. Henry Carr and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder………………………..………………35 f. World War I: A Brief History and Timeline………………………………….…………38 g. Zurich and Switzerland……………….…………………………….……………..……. 46 III. Page by Page: A Glossary……………………………………………………………………….48 a. 1:1………………………………………………………………………………………… 49 b. 1:2………………………………………………………………………………………… 53 c. 1:3………………………………………………………………………………………… 59 d. 1:4………………………………………………………………………………………… 66 e. 1:5………………………………………………………………………………………… 68 f. 1:6………………………………………………………………………………………… 76 g. 1:7………………………………………………………………………………………… 80 h. 1:8………………………………………………………………………………………… 82 i. 1:9………………………………………………………………………………………… 88 j. 2:1………………………………………………………………………………………… 90 k. 2:2………………………………………………………………………………………… 93 l. 2:3………………………………………………………………………………………… 99 m. 2:4………………………………………………………...………………………………102 n. 2:5……………………………………………………………………………………….. 107 o. 2.6………………………………………………………………………………..……… 111 IV. Supplemental Materials………………………………………………………………………. 114 a. The Charge of the Light Brigade by Lord Tennyson Alfred b. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prurock by T.S. Eliot c. The Music of Johannes Jeep V. Selected Sources………………………………………………………………………………..122 VI. Rehearsal Additions……………………………………………………………………………124 2 TOM STOPPARD AND TRAVESTIES Tom Stoppard (1937 - ) Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937 in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Straussler family fled to Singapore. Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, the two sons and their mother were sent on to Australia. Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, knowing that, as a doctor, he would be needed in its defence. His father died when Stoppard was four years old. In 1945, his mother Martha married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and shortened Tomas to Tom and, in 1946, after the war, moved the family to England. Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, never receiving a university education. He remained at the paper from 1954 until 1958, when the Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard the position of feature writer, humour columnist, and secondary drama critic, which took Stoppard into the world of theatre. From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a drama critic for Scene magazine, writing reviews and interviews. In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, which later evolved into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In the following years, Stoppard produced several works for radio, television and the theatre, including "M" is for Moon Among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace (1966) and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966). On 11 April 1967 — following acclaim at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival — the opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in a National Theatre production at the Old Vic made Stoppard an overnight success. His next play, Jumpers (1972), places a professor of moral philosophy in a murder mystery thriller alongside a slew of radical gymnasts. In 1974, Stoppard wrote Travesties. "Stoppardian" became a term describing works using wit, wordplay, and comedy while addressing philosophical concepts. In 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher's election, Stoppard noted to Paul Delaney: "I'm a conservative with a small c. I am a conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre." In 2007, Stoppard described himself as a "timid libertarian". Stoppard has been married three times and has four sons, Oliver, Barnaby, William, and Ed Stoppard. 3 On Writing Travesties “I started writing plays because everybody else was doing it at the time. As for the genesis of plays, it is never the story. The story comes just about last. I’m not sure I can generalize. The genesis of Travesties was simply the information that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin were all in Zurich at the same time. Anybody can see that there was some kind of play in that. But what play? I started to read Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce, and came across Henry Carr, and so on and so on” “Once I had this group of people to manipulate, I used them to get various things off my chest. At first there was no narrative line, but then I discovered that Joyce and Carr were mixed up in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. That gave me linking theme. I couldn’t write an inconsequential Dadaist play. Instinctively, I’m out of sympathy with Tzara and this kind of art, and I had to think very hard to give Tzara good arguments in the play. My prejudices were all on Joyce’s side--I utterly believe in his speech at the end of Act I on what an artist is. I used to have a slight guilt feeling about being an artist but I don’t any more. When I tried to visual a completely technological world without culture, I realized that one does not simply have to apologize for being an artist. It took me years to reach that understanding.” “Travesties...asks whether the words ‘revolutionary’ and ‘artist’ are capable of being synonymous, or whether they are mutually exclusive, or something in between.” “Originally, it was a play about Lenin and Tristan Tzara. I knew what Lenin looked like, so John [Wood, the play’s star] had to be Tzara. Then I discovered that Tzara was a small dapper man so I had to find another way. Then I discovered that James Joyce was also in Zurich. John was Joyce for a while. I hadn’t written a word. Then I was reading Ellmann’s biography of Joyce and I came across this Carr figure [a minor official in the British Consulate in Zurich]. He’s tall! So I wrote a play about Carr. Gods being gods, I said, if he was tall, John could play him.” “I want to marry the play of ideas to farce. Now that may be like eating steak tartare with chocolate sauce, but that’s the way it comes out. Everyone will have to decide for himself whether the seriousness is doomed or redeemed by the frivolity.” “All political acts must be judged on moral terms, in terms of their consequences…The repression which for better or worse turned out to be Leninism in action after 1917 was very much worse than anything which had gone on in Tsarist Russia.” “All political acts have a moral basis to them and are meaningless without it.” From Sacred Theater, edited by Ralph Yarrow: “Rather than pretend to certainties, Stoppard shows how the mind’s stream of binary opposites doesn’t yield the truth, and that to cling to any one conceptual point or context is to invite falsehood. As a dialectical movement, his “A, minus A” opposition is not an exclusive either/or system but a both/and system. This style…has the effect of attenuating social or objective boundaries, decontingencing the historical subject, dissolving the boundary between self and other and creating an intersubjective space – even without sacred rites, lofty myths and dance.” 4 Other Notable Works 1964: A Walk on the Water 1965: The Gamblers (based on the novel The Gambler by Dostoevsky) 1966: Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (a novel) Tom Stoppard’s first and only novel, originally published just before the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is an uproarious fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach; Malquist’s Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket; a couple of cowboys, one being named Jasper Jones; a lion who’s banned from the Ritz; an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen Christ; and three irresistible women. 1966: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead The absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966. The play is a result of a Ford Foundation grant that enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in Berlin, emerging with a one-act play titled originally titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear. And while the main source for the play is Hamlet, comparisons can also be made to Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Again, Stoppard can be seen using a variety of influences to create a conversation for and around his characters. Throughout the play there is a conversation between art and reality. The world in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live lacks order. However, art allows people that live in this world, as Stoppard hints that we do, to find order. As the Player says, "There's a design at work in all art." Art and the real world are in conflict.