ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Indian Ink

While Travesties is a memory play that deals with the purpose of art in society, it spans across many different topics, including morality, communism, Dadaism, artistic creation, and perception of the past. This play does not stray from the hallmarks of Tom Stoppard’s writing style, which weaves seemingly disparate subjects into one story. Some of his other works touch on such unexpectedly-paired topics as art and colonialism in Indian Ink or mathematics, science, love, and death in Arcadia. At first glance, these plays may feel daunting, but it is important to keep in mind that Stoppard is not writing a textbook or manifesto; he is simply writing a script with characters who have basic human wants and emotions. So even though Stoppard himself has acknowledged that his plays can feel like a game of “infinite leap-frog,” you’ll find that they aren’t as complicated as they may initially seem. It is not necessary to be a Russian historian or professor of Irish literature to enjoy this play. He is using a complex approach to get at the heart of questions that will engage us long after the curtain falls. As theatre critic Anita Gates says: “You can put your brain on red alert, sit up straight and listen intently to all of Tom Stoppard’s clever wordplay … Or you can relax, sit back and allow the play to wash over you, appreciating the verbal gems that come through clearly and letting the others pass.” Here are some statements that Stoppard has made about his own writing, which may give context to anyone grappling with the dramatic acrobatics of Travesties.

Tom Hollander in Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Travesties

“There is very often no single, clear statement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leap-frog. What happens in my plays is a kind of marriage of categories. It’s not my objective in the sense that I calculate it—it just seems to be what I’m doing, the way things come out. But 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.”

“If you consider the mixing up of ideas in farce a source of confusion, well, yes, God knows why I try to do it like that—presumably because I am like that. Plays are the people who write them. Seriousness compromised by frivolity. . . . My plays are a lot to do with the fact that I just don’t know.”

“[Travesties is] about Lenin and Joyce and Tzara in Zurich in 1917, but it’s not a historical play.”

“It’s worth asking whether the artist and the revolutionary can be the same person or whether the activities are mutually exclusive…How would you justify Ulysses to Lenin? Or Lenin to Joyce?”

“I think that art provides the moral matrix from which we draw our values about what the world ought to be like.”

“I write for a fairly broad audience, with me plumb in the middle. I don’t write for rareified audiences. I don’t think of myself as being rareified.”

“Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition that would occur to any intelligent person in his bath. They’re not academic questions, simply questions which have been given academic status.”

Travesties is playing at the American Airlines Theatre through June 17, 2018. For tickets and information, please visit our website.