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Travesties

Interview with Travesties’ Sara Topham

 

Education Dramaturge Ted Sod sits down with actress Sara Topham to discuss her role in Travesties and her return to Roundabout Theatre Company.

Ted Sod: Where were you born and where did you get your training? Did you have any teachers who had a profound impact on you?

Sara Topham: I was born in Victoria, B.C., in Canada. I had serious ballet training in Victoria with a woman named Sheila MacKinnon, who was truly a great teacher. She used classical ballet to teach theatre; what she was really teaching was storytelling. She is the person who set me on the path of being interested in how to tell a story to a group of people. I also went to the University of Victoria -- it’s one of the major Canadian universities – where I pursued a classical acting degree. After graduation, I put my resume together and an audition outfit in my suitcase and moved to Toronto – just like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street.  I didn’t know anyone in Toronto. I don’t know what I thought I was doing, but I had an instinct that I had to go away and do something brave – and, at the time, moving to Toronto certainly felt brave. I was very fortunate in Toronto because I was taken into the Stratford Festival Company. I did the conservatory training at Stratford and remained in the company for many seasons, which is how I ended up with you wonderful people at Roundabout. At Stratford, I worked with the late, great Brian Bedford, who I miss terribly. It was he who brought me to New York in 2010 and 2011 to play Gwendolen in his production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

 

TS: I understand that you played Cecily in a production of Travesties at the McCarter Theatre in 2012. What are the challenges of returning to a role that you’ve already played?

ST: I think there are more benefits than challenges. I feel confident that I understand how the play works and I know audiences get an enormous amount of pleasure out of it.  I think when you are approaching a part again and your brain and heart are attached to things you had done previously, it can be very hard to do something new. But because it’s been a long time -- at least it feels like a long time -- I think I’ll be able to adapt to new direction. I am sure I will benefit from my mouth remembering instinctually how those glorious words of Stoppard’s go. Which also means that, hopefully, I will know the words at a deeper level than I did the first time. Laurence Olivier used to say, “It’s not how well you know it, it’s how long you’ve known it.”

 

TS: Will you talk about how the character of Cecily is relevant to you?

ST: I think she is relevant to me because she thinks deeply about things. I’m very interested in Cecily’s tenacity in exchanging ideas. I enjoy taking on that part of Cecily’s intelligence. There are arguments in the play about what the place of art is in society and what responsibility artists and their work have to the political culture, to society at large, and those subjects are very relevant in our times. Cecily’s wrestling with things that artists have wrestled with for decades, but I’m sure she might not be too keen on being compared to an artist because she is, as you know, pursuing other interests. I think her tenacity in getting ahold of an argument and really wanting to follow it through all the way to the end -- that’s important and relevant as well. One of the things that I see happening in the world right now is that people think just listening to someone’s opposing point of view is tantamount to agreeing with it. People feel obligated to shut down any point of view that doesn’t reflect their own thinking. We are losing the capacity to have any kind of exchange of ideas because we’re all so busy holding onto and defending our own. Something wonderful about Stoppard’s play is that it is just chock-full of opposing ideas. An audience can go from agreeing with one of the characters to agreeing with another character who has an opposing view. I think that’s why we go to the theatre. When theatre is at its best, it engages us with both comfortable and uncomfortable ideas.

 

TS: What do you personally feel the role of theatre is in today’s world?

ST: I think when we grow up, we lose the opportunity to feel challenging things in a safe environment, in the way that little kids do when they hear stories read to them that give them different emotional experiences. The theatre is this amazing place where we can, for instance, see a play about a woman who has lost a child and be with that woman and hopefully experience a deep sense of empathy for her. I believe experiencing that in a theatre allows us, in our own lives, to be more compassionate when we encounter someone like that outside the theatre. I think the theatre is a place for us to be with our fellow human beings and wrestle with ideas, with feelings, with experiences. I think that’s what our job is as practitioners of acting. We are storytellers.

 

TS:  What kind of stamina does it take to perform in Travesties? It seems to me like playing this twice on one day is going to be exhausting; is that true?

ST: It is. It’s not as hard as Noises Off, which I’ve done; Noises Off is the most exhausting play I’ve ever been in. Travesties requires mental stamina; it requires Olympic scale concentration. That was my experience before, and I’m sure it will be in Patrick’s production as well. You cannot take your eye off the ball for a second because there is so much precision required, so much accuracy. In the case of the Cecily and Henry Carr scene – that scene has got these time slips because Carr is remembering events, and his memory is not very reliable -- he keeps repeating the scene over and over, and he is trying to get to an ending that he likes. So, what happens is, you get to a certain point in the scene, then you go back almost to the beginning and start again, but it’s always slightly different. It would be very easy for us to get trapped in a loop, and the audience at Roundabout would end up watching Travesties for six hours!

TS: When I asked Stoppard what he looks for in actors, he said: “clarity of utterance.”

ST: There is no room for sloppiness. The rhythm is so important. I think in all of Stoppard’s plays, the words are of supreme importance. The words are God, and you have to get them right, you have to get them inside your being in such way a that they come out with the rhythm that he intended. That way, the words can sing because there is so much music in the play’s text. It’s almost like there is an internal music to the dialogue, and it requires figuring out what the rhythm is and then not repeating it like a robot. You cannot take anything for granted; you are remitting and rediscovering that rhythm every single day. That’s the part that’s exhausting mentally, I think.

 

TS: I’m curious if you think Roundabout’s audiences should prepare before seeing Travesties?

ST: I think audiences should never underestimate themselves. I always say this to students who are coming to see Shakespeare: “If you don’t understand the play, that’s not your fault, that’s our fault.” Our job as interpretive artists, which is what we actors are, is to lift it up off the two-dimensional page and make it live; hopefully, we will breathe life into it. So, what I think is always required of an audience is that they come to the theatre with their hearts and minds open and a willingness to engage with the play and the production. I would ask audiences to make a bit of an investment in thinking and listening in order to get a huge payoff. Tom Stoppard is just a wonderful writer. He gives the audience all of the information they need to enjoy the play.

 

TS: What about the historical characters and references?

ST: It’s not as if you need to come in knowing everything about Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Yes, there is an extra layer of meaning that you might get if you happen to know a thing or two about the Russian Revolution or you happen to know about Tristan Tzara and Dadaism. This play is really a vaudeville; what Tom Stoppard has written is a vaudeville that has some serious content in it and some ridiculous, absurd, and touching content, too. The writing in Travesties is full of love and conflict. I don’t think it’s exclusively an intellectual experience by any means.

 

TS: How does the fact that you played Gwendolen in Brian Bedford's production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Roundabout affect your understanding and work on Cecily in Travesties?  

ST: Having spent almost two years of my life in The Importance of Being Earnest is an invaluable asset when working on Travesties! Of course, I was playing Gwendolen, rather than Cecily -- but just having the whole sense of Wilde's rhythms and energy internalized is a wonderful base to work from. I have said before that Stoppard's play is both a Valentine and a decapitation of Earnest The Valentine aspect results in a lot of mirrored rhythms and at times whole lines of text appearing in surprising places; the decapitation aspect comes, of course, with how Stoppard turns those words inside out and yet manages to make the plot unfold in a way we recognize! Both plays are a joy. Very difficult to do, but a joy to play once you find your way through!  And I think because most audiences are familiar with Earnest - it can be a lovely roadmap to take with you in your mind as you come on this crazy journey with us.

Charlotte Parry and Sara Topham in The Importance of Being Earnest

TS: What do you look for from the director when you collaborate on a revival?

ST: Of course, you want to be able to contribute and discover things and perhaps not be told everything up front because it’s always better if you get there yourself. I, of course, will have in my being some of the things that I did in the McCarter production, and some of them I will be very fond of and maybe I will have a hard time letting them go -- but with most things, I am sure I’ll think, “What we’ve come up with this time around is better!” I always endeavor to be as open and flexible as possible. I got the sense from both Tom Hollander and Patrick Marber after meeting with them that they’re not interested in imposing things on people. I think a reasonable amount of freedom is helpful, given that we are recreating something that already exists. I have no doubt about Patrick giving the cast that. He’s a very open, interested, curious person insofar as I know him, and that can only be of benefit in the rehearsal room.

 

TS: Is there a question you wish I had asked that I didn’t?

ST:Not really. You always ask such good questions. Here’s something I should have said: I think Travesties is like a giant piñata; you might not get every piece of candy that falls out of it, but you’ll get some that you really love and some that you’re going to save to eat later.

 

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


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2017-2018 Season, Travesties


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The Travesty of Travesties

 

At first glance, Travesties may seem to be a nearly impossible work to crack. Traversing literary styles and references, delving headfirst into the history of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and pitting dense intellectual arguments on the meaning and purpose of art against each other, Tom Stoppard’s absurdist and avant-garde play can seem hopelessly out of reach for anyone who isn’t an expert in these particular topics. But Stoppard has created a roadmap that allows his audiences to untangle the characters, plotlines, and references of Travesties as they watch, and his first clue for doing so is provided in the title of the play itself. What exactly, then, is a travesty?

 

“Travesty” may just be one of the most misused words in the English language. Often erroneously used as a synonym for “tragedy” or “disaster,” the word “travesty” is actually defined as “a false, absurd, or distorted representation of something” and is close in meaning to “mockery,” “parody,” or “farce.” Travesties, then, is comprised of exactly that: an assortment of parodies or “distorted representations” of historical and literary figures and events. With this as a point of entry into the genre and tone of the play, we can parse out who and what is “travestied” in Travesties -- and why.

 

Henry Carr's discharge certificate

Set in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I, Travesties follows former British soldier Henry Carr (based on a real-life soldier of the same name who fought in World War I) as he, as an old man, recounts a series of meetings he claims to have had with three historical figures: communist revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known as Vladimir Lenin), Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara, and renowned author James Joyce. While in Zurich, Lenin learns of the Russian Revolution and attempts to find safe passage back to Russia; Tzara defends Dadaism against more traditional forms of art; and Joyce casts Carr in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, for which he is the business manager. Though all of these events did really happen and all four of these people were present in Zurich during this time, the idea that all four of them met at the same time and that all their stories interwove in some way is purely the invention of Carr’s failing and fanciful memory. It is the breakdown of Carr’s mental faculties and his desire to cast himself as a more important figure in these stories than he really was that warps these historical events and people into outlandish travesties.

 

Roundabout's production of The Importance of Being Earnest

True to the play’s title, then, Carr’s unreliable narration takes these fictionalized meetings to their farcical extremes, and the characters become over-the-top, almost cartoonish parodies of their real-life counterparts. Adding to the distortion is Carr’s occasional inability to separate his own story from the production of The Importance of Being Earnest in which he performed for James Joyce; hence why Carr includes the characters of Gwendolen and Cecily from Oscar Wilde’s  play in his memories and sometimes even frames supposedly real-life events as scenes from Earnest, which are themselves often twisted and expanded nearly beyond recognition.

 

The resulting web of conflicts, storylines, and clashing philosophies in Travesties becomes, with Carr’s inconstant memory as a catalyst, an explosive dramatization of the many and varied cultures, ideas, and nationalities that could theoretically have bumped up against each other in neutral Zurich during World War I. The play becomes a bit of a blender of conflicting ideologies and caricatures, but this is Stoppard’s intention, and there’s nothing to fear if it all throws us a bit off-balance. “[T]here is very often no single, clear statement in my plays,” Stoppard has said. “What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leap-frog.” It’s only natural, then, that Travesties might leave our minds doing that exact same thing as we leave the theatre.

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


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2017-2018 Season, Travesties


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Travesties Design Statements

 

Tim Hatley/Costume and Set Design

My starting point as a designer is always to read the play, and in the case of Travesties, which is a complex play, it required careful reading and thought to begin to understand the threads and layers of the writing, and talking closely with the director, Patrick Marber. It seemed to me that our production needed a strong yet simple approach to the design. The shifting of time and location is clear in the writing and did not need physical transitions to interrupt the flow. Our space is both present and memory, library and apartment, and allows for characters to appear and disappear within. The costumes are rooted strongly in the period, and their palette was developed in tandem with the development of the space. Cross references to Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, were an enjoyable anchor to designing the play.

 

Set rendering for Travesties

 

Neil Austin/Lighting Design

Tom Stoppard brilliantly represents the failing memory of Henry Carr through Dadaist jumps and repetitions in the text of his play, Travesties. And so, the lighting is designed to help the audience follow the narrative through these fractured reminiscences by giving them visual clues as to which time period it is and where the location is. The lighting in the more narrative sections of the play, when Carr in his dotage is unreliably recalling his time in Zurich, has a very different visual look to the scenes in the play which are set in the year 1917.  As Carr’s memories misfire and get repeated in ever more confused versions, both lighting and sound mark them with a library bell and a flicker – not only to underscore the time-slip, but to also aid the audience through the confusion happening in Carr’s mind.

 

Adam Cork/Sound Design and Original Music

On the surface, Travesties seems to be a play about the unreliable reminiscences of a British diplomat named Henry Carr. But my inspiration for the music and sound score is drawn from the way it stages the struggle between the brutal power of meaninglessness (as expounded by the anarchic “Dada” art of Tristan Tzara) on the one hand, and the rich potential of a densely textured multiplicity of meaning (exemplified in the fiction of James Joyce) on the other. Although they differed in their views regarding the value of the fragments left behind, both Tzara and Joyce (like many writers, artists, and composers of the era) were discovering ways in which the shattering effects of war and rapid social change could be expressed in artistic gestures. Tzara’s “Dada” inspires the disruptive ingredient in the musicscape: drums and cymbals puncture the drama like bursting bombs and rapidfire bullets, together with sirens wailing “EMERGENCY!” and “WAR!” Tom Stoppard has brilliantly sculpted the whole, translating the “Dada” technique of photomontage into a dramatic structural principle, so that we move without transition from one time frame, one literary style, one theatrical convention to another in a cut-and-paste succession of dazzling incongruities. This enables us to baldly introduce birdsong when the text suddenly topples into Wildean lyricism, as well as soulful Russian chorales and opera and cabaret songs when the scenes take other abrupt turns. All this is set against the historical backdrop of both the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and the play embraces the extraordinary historical coincidence of Tzara, Joyce, and Lenin all living in Zurich in 1917 in the Swiss afterglow, what’s more, of Einstein’s transformation of physical science with his relativity theory. Space and Time were no longer seen as fixed quantities – they could be distorted by other forces. This inspired my accompaniment for the moments in the play when Carr has little memory slips and reality seems to reset, delivering different versions of the same events. All the sounds, all the words, all the tunes in the world of Travesties are strangely untethered from the familiar: “Even the cheese has got holes in it!”

 

Cast of Travesties

Polly Bennett/Movement Director

Where choreography is about making from scratch, movement directing is about working with a text that already exists and transferring what is in a script from “page to stage.” Travesties is unlike any other play I have worked on, as my work has been less about finding a physical language that runs through the piece but instead working to enliven specific moments of Stoppard’s text. The movement is subsequently led by Carr’s wayward mind -- the benefit of which is the freedom it gave me to elaborate his confused memories in an expressive way. As a movement director, you can’t do your job with—out the presence of actors, without bodies in a space, so knowing that a finale dance was written, I used the Charleston and swing dance as a way to start rehearsals -- a company that dances together, stays together, after all! Then, as rehearsals continued, the joy, unity, and silliness of dance slid into the work, making comedic moments of physicality part of the fabric of the production. Soon, it made total sense to have Tristan Tzara twirling and spinning as he entered the stage, to have characters popping out from cubbyholes to sing unexpectedly, and Carr’s fantasy of Cecily very easily morphed into a literary themed table dance (of course!). There is also subtler movement work at play in Travesties. I worked with Tom Hollander, who plays Carr, on the specificity of the character’s elderly body: we explored where age manifests in his body and developed techniques to ensure that his deterioration was rooted in truth. I also worked with the actors to engage with each other, their characters, and the theatre space, all so they can keep up with Stoppard’s marathon text for eight shows a week.

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


Related Categories:
2017-2018 Season, Travesties


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