Tinteán

A novelist, a bolshevik, and a dadaist walked into a bar, is one way of getting the joke that is Travesties. Or it’s a demonstration of how The Importance of Being Earnest is a Marxist tract. Or it’s a slideshow of linguistic fireworks in which any amount of explosive art talk does not get in the way of a fizzing Wildean epigram. The inventor of this literary party game said last year in the New Yorker that ‘the play is a kind of luxury, in which you pretend that James Joyce was there in Zurich at the same time as Lenin and Tristan Tzara. It’s a kind of intellectual entertainment.’ Bloomsday in Melbourne chose to make Tom Stoppard’s play the centrepiece of this year’s festivities, being a cherished work amongst Joyce tragics.

 

The name Henry Carr erupts in the most physically violent scene in Ulysses, as a drunken and abusive British soldier sparring for a fight at the brothel. Just as Dante placed his enemies in Hell, Joyce turned a suave British diplomat he worked with in Zurich during the War into someone who was the dark side of British power, a foul-mouthed figure of suppression in Edwardian Dublin. The Henry Carr inTravesties reminisces on his time in the British Consulate. “I knew him well,” Carr repeats of each person he has met, echoing Hamlet and reminding us that they, but Joyce especially, are now dead. These reminiscences serve as our entry into that society, a city in turmoil due to the effects of war: refugees, spies, misfits, revolutionaries, and (I am afraid to say) artists. These memories are not aided by incipient Alzheimers, which means, for example, Carr is selective about what he recalls, is in denial about old grudges, and cannot remember the name of the character he played in Earnest. When Ronan McDonald at the Bloomsday Seminar puts it that Joyce was politically opposed to England, Carr is someone who springs to mind. Dion Mills plays Carr with vigour and style, bringing to life the hypocritical imperialist who believes his own propaganda, and who would say goodbye to all that for the love of his life, which occasionally appears to be a fashion fetishist’s passion for custom-made jodhpurs.

Enter his sparring partner, the poetry-shredding poet Tristan Tzara, played with hedonistic goodwill and daring by Matthew Connell. Monacled and sporting a coat of many Dadas, Connell accentuated the fraught contradictions of the anti-artist of the period, wondering if this is revolution, nihilism, or just done for the pleasurable shock of the new. Tzara would have endorsed the stage furniture, decorated with pages from the complete works of Shakespeare, in découpage. His own efforts at snipping a sonnet into new forms eventually wins over the object of his desire, Carr’s younger sister, Gwendolen. Joanna Halliday delivers a subtle performance of convincing types, as she shifts quickly from one social role to another, none of which are precisely what Gwendolen would have chosen herself, if she had had the choice. The Wildean paradox between reality and artifice was played out by Halliday with all the pokerfaced verve it deserves.

 

Joyceans all let us rejoice for we are jung and easily freudened. Our attention shall always return to the author of Ulysses, played this year with a knowing hauteur by Johnathan Peck. Stoppard’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged scrounger is the counterpoint to Tzara. Peck projects that mixture of self-confidence, erudition, and worldliness that we know from the biographies. He’s an operator, never at a loss for a limerick. Tzara is the harbinger of conceptual art, someone addicted to the random. Stoppard gives Tzara some fairly stunning verbiage, but it is his Joyce who turns verbiage into form. The Ithaca catechism scene, in which Tzara gives brief answers to Joyce’s grammatically intricate questions, is a case in point. Their altercations descend into abuse, or is that just mutual misunderstanding? Whatever, the overriding comic dialogue left the audience waiting for the next punchline, rather than pondering the niceties of aesthetics.

 

 

Cecily too has had her consciousness raised. Assisting Bolshie No. 1 in the library had its effect, though Cecily is always a person with her own mind, which serves her well in most situations. Her duet with Gwendolen is one of the abiding delights of Travesties and their rendition this time around was stageshow perfection. Librarians are the object of a hundred misconceptions and Cecily’s is that she thinks alphabetically. Her education in literature has got as far as G: she knows Gilbert but doesn’t know Sullivan. She reminds us of Joyce’s own obsessions with the letters of the alphabet, ending as they do in their cosmic meanings, their perpetual regeneration in life and art, in Finnegans Wake.

 

The alphabet is indefatigable and so too is Bloomsday’s Artistic Director Frances Devlin Glass. Once more she has pulled the rabbit out of the hat, ably assisted by Producer Steve Carey and Director Jennifer Sarah Dean. An empty space of vacant picture frames, wonky bookcases and ancient gramophone-players was transformed into a world alive with the ambitions and cross-purposes of some brilliant Europeans. We smile at Henry Carr’s defence that what he likes ‘might be nonsense, but at least it’s clever nonsense,’ knowing that the same could be said of Travesties, yet the play moves sprightly and learned across art, politics, fashion, culture, and history, leaving us with many ideas and no clear answers. Could this play have been written by anyone other than a Middle European? The figure of Lenin is impossible to shake. The figure of Tzara epitomises idealism when it meets absurdism. Joyce epitomises the artist who had to live in Europe to get a focus on his homeland. And the figure of Carr is that amalagam of Englishness, largely agnostic about its own culture but fierce in its defence, that still has an honours system that could award the author of Travesties with a knighthood.