"Travesties" was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin - were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholly riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.
"A tinderbox of a play, blazing with wit, exhilaratingly, diabolically clever."
Time
"A razzling, dazzling effervescence that erupts and bubbles throughout the evening. A remarkable play, as iridescent as a rainbow, clever, adroit and ultimately moving, encrusted with puns, garnished with verbal extravagances, madcap fun. For once the entertainment offered is not just illuminating, it is actually dazzling."
