Travesties Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire

Suddenly, the 20th century seems a long, long time ago.

Its schisms feel like stories from an old, declining civilisation, and its many isms, well, they seem mere parlour games now. And this for two reasons: firstly, the wild statements of artistic manifestos have been so internalised by the culture that they appear obvious, rather than shocking.

Dada truly has become Gaga. And secondly, because these poses pale into insignificance in the face of the 21st-century’s numerous, intractable problems of a planetary scale.

This is the moral we can now draw from Travesties. Tom Stoppard’s play is set in Zurich, 1917, where James Joyce (Ronan Leahy), Dadaist Tristan Tzara (Ciaran O’Brien) and Lenin (Peter Daly) are brought together. More accurately, it is Zurich as remembered by Henry Carr (Will Irvine) years later. Carr is an unreliable narrator, more interested in how Joyce didn’t pay him back for a pair of trousers than in the grand themes of art and politics that fizz around the play. And, boy, do they fizz.

Stoppard’s play is ridiculously clever. But it ends being merely that. It is a credit to his verbal skill that using Joyce, Wilde, and even Shakespeare as material for parody does not expose him by comparison. But the failings of Travesties as a play are exposed by its far-from-seamless plot borrowings from The Importance of Being Earnest.

Lynne Parker directs with assurance and a great ear for the play’s laughs and her cast are models of timing and clarity. But this production fails to overcome the play’s failings, while throwing up other, albeit interesting, new ones.

* Runs until Jun 23

Alan O’Riordan