A SAMUEL FRENCH, LTD. TITLE
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
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Cast Size
3w, 5m -
Subgenre
Period -
Target Audience
Adult
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
- Time Period 1910s/WWI
- Setting A library, a drawing-room
- Features Period Costumes
Licensing & Materials
- Minimum Fee: £70 per performance plus VAT when applicable.
Please submit a license request to determine availability.
Authors
Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard’s most recent play, Leopoldstadt, opened at Wyndham's Theatre in 2020 and transferred to Broadway in 2022. It won multiple Awards, including an Olivier Award and Tony Award for Best Play. He wrote his first play, Enter a Free Man, whilst working as a journalist i ...