Travesties by Tom Stoppard

Travesties by Tom Stoppard

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.

Tomás Straüssler was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 and immigrated to England with his family in 1946. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered in London in 1967, he was instantly catapulted into the forefront of modern playwrights. He is the phenomenally celebrated author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert's Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist et etc. He's also authored screenplays for films like The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil. He received the David Cohen Award for lifetime accomplishment in literature in 2017.