Description

Travesties was born out of Stoppard’s noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth centuries most crucial revolutionaries – James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristian Tzara, and Lein – 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 theatre and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers.

Taking Carr at his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could’ve 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.