Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Travesties by Tom Stoppard ISBN: 0-8021-5089-6 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: July, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Zurich inside Stoppard's own head
Comment: This is probably my favorite Stoppard play. Everything about it is raised to such a level of excellence that it's difficult to imagine how it can be surpassed.
Stoppard showcases his linguistic talents at their most dazzling and expects the reader to keep up intellectually. Not to sound daunting, but in order to enjoy "Travesties" properly, it helps to know some rudimentary German, French, and Russian; be well familiar with Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and James Joyce's "Ulysses"; and also to have a good factual knowledge of the Great War and the Great October Revolution. If you do not have this background knowledge, you risk missing out on most of Stoppard's witty insight and leaving the theatre/closing the book confused and disappointed.
The most important thing to remember about Travesties is that it is essentially Stoppard arguing with himself. This really shines through in his "derailed" scenes, where the characters have to abort a scene half-way through because it's obviously going in a wrong direction. Basically, it starts out with the characters being themselves, but as it progresses, one can see that they are simply two sides of Stoppard's own mind speaking to the audience through masks. And then it's as if the author remembers to keep his distance from the audience and steps back into the shadows. The effect is rather mystical; it's as if we are granted a brief glimpse beyond the fabric of what we take to be reality. What remains unclear is whether we are now looking into the "true" reality or yet another scene setting.
In short, buy the book, read it outloud, amuse yourself, alarm your neighbors.
Rating: 5
Summary: Just plain genius!
Comment: This is one of my most favorite plays, and I was lucky enough to see it performed on stage. In 1917 Zurich, James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and VI Lenin are all converging on the movements that define their very careers later in life. The tale is narrated by Henry Carr, an actual historical figure, as an old man in 1972, who was with the three celebs as a young man, and his memory is a bit faulty! He once played Algernon in "The Importance of Being Earnest" which required him to buy some new trousers, and he insists that Joyce reimburse him. Thus starts a legal battle.
Travesties is a non-stop energetic creative retelling of history in its most fantastical setting. Read it, and if you ever get the opportunity, go see it!
Rating: 4
Summary: Postmodern or just no historical perspective?
Comment: Zurich 1917, a marvellous subject. The meeting point of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries on one side, and of the new « revolutionary » artists, be they James Joyce and the stream of consciousness writers, or Tristan Tzara and the Dada movement.
The first interest of the play is to situate the dynamic of each revolutionary movement very well. Lenin is the figurehead of the revolutionary politicians, James Joyce and Tzara of the modern literature movements.
Then Stoppard makes them meet. In Zurich it is more or less an artificial meeting though they share most of their ideas (the files that are unknowingly exchanged at the beginning and exchanged back at the end show how identical their ideas are) and yet they have styles, general postures that make them unable to have a real dialogue.
Tom Stoppard goes even further by tracing along Lenin's positions on art. He shows the perfect contradiction contained - as Walt Whitman would say - by the man. On one side (Tolstoy), he understands that a work of art is a reflection (hence not a purely identical image) of social contradictions and therefore of society, and also a reflection of the contradictory artist (all artists contain contradictions) and his contradictory position in society (hence in the social contradictions of this society). On the other side, once in power, he condemns, at first, then wavers on the subject, Mayakovsky and the Futurist mocement, and definitely considers intellectuals as bourgeois individualists. But the artists of 1917 represent exactly a similar contradiction between the absolutely nihilistic approach of the Dada movement, and the mentally realistic movement represented by James Joyce. The former rejects all heritage. The latter rearranges the full heritage within a modern man's consciousness, hence within a revolutionary or disturbing consciousness.
The play is at times funny, at times realistic, at times dramatic, according to the points of view, but the essential one of these is the recollections two (minor) characters have of the period sixty years later. We are forced to accept that historical perspective : what it was then and what we can do of it now.
The conclusion of the play is typical perpetual movement, here perpetual syllogism : « Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing. » Unfinished of course, like any historical achievement. History is always unfinished, in spite of Marx's dream of a contradiction-free communist society. This is the biggest sham of western philosophy ever dreamed of by a man of the amplitude and intensity of Karl Marx. You can be a genius but reality is more real than philosophy. The proof, as Marx liked to say, of the pudding is in my eating it. Full stop. Period.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
 |
Title: Tom Stoppard Plays 5: Arcadia, the Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood by Tom Stoppard ISBN: 0571197515 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
 |
Title: Tom Stoppard : Arcadia, Jumpers, Travesties, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Jim Hunter ISBN: 0571197825 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
 |
Title: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Henry Popkin ISBN: 0802132758 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: May, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
 |
Title: Jumpers: A Play by Tom Stoppard ISBN: 0802151000 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
 |
Title: Tom Stoppard Plays 4: Dalliance, Undiscovered Country, Rough Crossing, on the Razzle, the Seagull by Tom Stoppard ISBN: 0571197507 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
