Michael Coveney on Tom Stoppard's Travesties (original) (raw)

Tom Stoppard's new-look Travesties (RSC, Barbican) restates the revolutionary artist debate in bold, surreal terms. The 1917 Zurich library, where Tristan Tzara is cutting up sonnets, James Joyce pondering Ulysses and Lenin hearing about upheavals back home, is a blood-red edifice of one-dimensional shelves.

These disappear to reveal the pure white fragility of the room where Henry Carr, the British Consular official, is enmeshed with his famous contemporaries in a brilliant rewrite of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Significantly, Richard Hudson's superb design also incorporates a red Soviet poster figure in the white void and puts red covers on all 'practical' literature the lost chapters of Joyce and Lenin, the notebooks of Gwendolen and Cecily.

The chief justification for the revival is Antony Sher's Henry Carr, less cerebral than John Wood's in 1974, just as funny, more urgent. He barters pathos for the gleeful relishing of others' misfortunes. He reminisces hilariously, in the hazily inaccurate, name-dropping style of Alan Bennett's Forty Years On, before springing one of his characteristic transformations as a pigeon-chested, gleaming fantasist. From this point, Sher plays Carr as a chameleon farceur bending the scenes to his own purposes.

The minor participant in major events is a Stoppard speciality from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern acting out their tragedy with Hamlet as a back-cloth to Dirk Bogarde's embassy minion refracting the plot of The Merry Widow through his own acidic asides for Glyndebourne at the Festival Hall this summer. Sher's elevation of Carr above the European elite is the most dramatic usurpation yet.

The cast moves and dances well, though the correlation of voice and offstage (recorded?) music is poor. David Westhead's Tzara and Lloyd Hutchinson's Joyce are blissfully adept and funny. The Wildean heroines are briskly played by Rebecca Saire and, especially, Amanda Harris, whose prim librarian ('Intellectual curiosity is not so common that one can afford to discourage it') is both a wonderful extension of Cecily Cardew and a worthy buffer to Sher's pyrotechnics.