Program Notes

From the producer: Travesties premiered in 1974, seven years after Stoppard's glittering debut with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead [voted by you Best Production of our 2001 play with fire season]. As in the earlier work, major events pass through a minor filter to hilarious effect. Human history is exposed as a travesty: not some grandly heroic march of order, reason and righteousness, but rather a series of random acts, more-often-than-not the unintended consequence of love-inspired pettiness or passion. Here, the witless witness is Henry Carr, a nondescript British consul, wiling away World War One in neutral Switzerland. In Stoppard's revisionist take, it is around Carr that the twentieth century explodes into life. Like tectonic plates, Art and Politics collide at the unlikely time-space intersection of Zurich, 1917 and the rest, as they say, is history. But just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remained oblivious to William Shakespeare, so too do James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin miss any allusion to Oscar Wilde. The joke is unwittingly on them, and so wittily on us. That's the Importance of Being Stoppard!

-Simon Prast