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Travesties

Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy  /  3w, 5m

Travesties
by Tom Stoppard

"Stoppard has spun out a fantastically elaborate web to snare his three giants in the same play...One of the great pleasures of the evening is Stoppard's skill in moving in and out of Wilde's dialogue and rewriting it for his own purposes." - The London Times

  • Cast Size
    Cast Size
    3w, 5m
  • SubGenre
    Subgenre
    Period
  • Audience
    Target Audience
    Adult
Accolades
Accolades
  • Nominee: 2017 Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play

Details

Summary
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 wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.
Keywords
M5 (20s, middle-age, 60s)
F3 (young, 40s)
  • Time Period 1910s/WWI
  • Setting A library, a drawing-room
  • Features Period Costumes

Licensing & Materials

  • Minimum Fee: £70 per performance plus VAT when applicable.

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Scripts

Available Formats:

Authors

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard’s most recent play, The Hard Problem, opened at the National Theatre in 2015. He wrote his first play, Enter a Free Man, whilst working as a journalist in Bristol. His plays include Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, After Magritte, ...

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