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One of the characteristics of modernist culture at the beginning of the twentieth century was the radical liquidation of the inherited structures and the creation of a bold phantasm for the organizing of an unprecedented society and a revolutionary art. In respect to this historical project, the political aesthetics of Dadaism, Joyce's fictional innovations that marked the height of high modernism in Ulysses, and the Soviet Proletcultur in Russia which Lenin spearheaded, ran parallel courses and allowed for extraordinary travesties in merging the concepts of aesthetic, literary, and political action. Shaping these political and aesthetic dimensions into one vision, Tom Stoppard's Travesties brings together Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara in a dazzling display of a time when an incipient communism expressed the last political installation of the left modernist project and when the work of art was used as a special kind of laboratory for designing and testing this project.
First performed at the Aldwych Theatre in London on 10 June 1974, in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Travesties is a play constructed on the dramatic form of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Beyond the obvious similarities between the two plays which are, each in its own right, a "Trivial Comedy for Serious People" (The Importance) and "a masterpiece of serious wit" (Travesties), Stoppard relies on an incident explained in the "Henry Carr" section of Travesties. Using information from Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Stoppard throws in Travesties Joyce's quarrel with Henry Carr, the obscure diplomat who played the part of Algernon Montcrieff in Joyce's dramatization of Oscar Wilde's masterpiece in Zurich and who later sued Joyce.
Like The Importance, Travesties is an unusual play where instead of inviting the spectator into an already furnished and habitable world the author invites himself and his opinions into the world of the spectator. Although he never outstays his sufferance with the public in the way Wilde all too often did, Stoppard ensconces himself in Travesties with similar insolent freedom and provocative wit, filled with absurdities and clever pastiches that methodically invert normal expectations. Like The Importance, Travesties is a shocker built on the simple structure of the paradox and parody. It is pure sport of the mind, with obscene limericks, Beethoven's Appassionato and...