Travesties: A Play

About this book

Travesties was born out of Stoppards noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth centurys 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.