Dance of Words

By T. E. Kalem

TRAVESTIES by TOM STOPPARD

This is a tinderbox of a play blazing with wit, paradox, parody and, yes, ideas. It is exhilaratingly, diabolically clever. The bloodline of Wilde and Shaw is not extinct while Tom Stoppard lives.

The playwright's fancy was taken by the fact that three revolutionaries of vastly differing temperaments and persuasions lived contiguously in Zurich during World War I. They were Tristan Tzara, Rumanian poet and founder of Dadaism, James Joyce and Lenin. There is no evidence that they ever met each other, but in Travesties, they do. Stoppard was further intrigued by a suit filed against Joyce by one Henry Carr for the price of a pair of trousers. A minor British consular official, Carr had purchased the trousers to play Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest for a Joyce-managed troupe called the English Players.

Exile, to some degree, is Stoppard's abiding theme. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is exile through ignorance. The two mini-heroes do not understand Hamlet or Elsinore. Junipers is exile from God. No one can clearly divine his purposes or verify his existence. Travesties is exile by intent, a rebellion against social traditions and aesthetic norms. Travesties, a play-within-a-monologue, begins with the age-frazzled Carr (John Wood) reminiscing intimately about the famed Zurich trio in a way that illustrates a perennial travesty: the ravages of time on memory. What follows is part vaudeville, part nonstop debate and part instant replay of Wilde's play with absurdist variations.

Joyce (James Booth) appears wearing a jacket with shamrocks on it, spouts limerick after limerick and intermittently becomes Lady Bracknell. Tzara (Tim Curry) comes on with a pair of scissors, slices up a Shakespeare sonnet, dumps the lines into a top hat, and extrapolates them as gibberish to show that antiart reigns supreme. In the Wildean substructure of Travesties, Tzara doubles as John Worthing (Earnest in town-Jack in the country). Carr once again plays his friend Algy. Lenin (Harry Towb) has no role in Earnest. Isolatedly aloof, he delivers a stinging diatribe on the duties of an artist in a workers' state, but later tearfully melts at the playing of Beethoven's Appassionato.

Stop-motion devices, relished by Stoppard, telescope, bisect or reverse the flow of time. The sound of a cuckoo clock, which Stoppard treats as the Swiss national anthem, periodically suspends the action, and the same opening lines of dialogue lead into an entirely different episode. One scene has Joyce arguing that no one would have been remotely aware of the Trojan War had it not been for Homer, a dozen other artists, and his own upcoming Ulysses. Scarcely a word is uttered without a play on it. A few of the puns are punishing, but most of the word play is daffily delicious, as for instance, "My art belongs to Dada."

In an evening that is a dance of delight, and thanks to Director Peter Wood an astute lesson in the choreography of thought, there is only one segment that falters with a portentous sobriety. At the beginning of Act II, Lenin's long monologue with its didactic fervor disrupts the tone of what has preceded it and makes it a bit difficult to get back into the partygoing mood of the rest of the play.

In a vital way, the evening belongs to an actor who can do the impossible. John Wood's performance is heroic. The torrent of words flows from his lips with impeccable delivery and phrasing, and he accents speech with stylishly funny bits of body English. He shifts between his two roles, and two ages of man, with breathtaking ease. Huddled in his bathrobe, he is a chain-smoking old codger wistfully scouring the lens es of his fogged-over memory.

As the drawing-room dandy, Carr-Algy, he is icily imperturbable as he explains to his butler that the Russian Revolution has begun be cause the Russian upper classes have lost patience with their scoundrelly, insubordinate, rapacious servants and turned on them. It may well take some time before we see another performance of such demanding tempo and such superbly controlled authority.

The rest of the cast is shadowed but valiant. James Booth's Joyce lacks some of the incisive arrogance that the character ought to pos sess, while Tim Curry's Tzara is larkily iconoclastic without quite being a cultural arson ist. In the unstable role of Lenin, Harry Towb shuttles between evangelism and browbeating. Beth Morris as Cecily, the girl who eventually marries Carr-Algy, must be nominated the minx-charmer of the cast.

But the foxiest charmer is Tom Stoppard, who has one character say: "It may be nonsense, but at least it's clever nonsense." Amen, and God bless.

"Somewhere after Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud, classical acting sank into the sands," says John Wood. "There was a generation gap. I'm trying to pick up the reins." But who is John Wood? He only joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1971, and he has spent much of his professional life in television. At 45, he is a sport among English actors. Quizzical blue eyes look out from the face of a classics don; he could not, even if he tried, roar with animal magnetism. His spirit is gentle and idealistic. His idol was the late Louis Jouvet, an actor of ineffable urbanity. From Jerry Lewis, with whom he worked in films, he learned that "there is only one response--laughter--to the most cruel, horrific thing you can imagine."

Wood and Tom Stoppard work together like the Flying Wallendas, swoops and dives perfectly matched. Travesties was written for John. "He has enough experience in his face to cover the old man, plus he is physically and mentally young enough to suggest youth and agility," explains Stoppard. Wood was not so sanguine. He is a perfectionist. Although Travesties has been in the RSC repertory for more than a year. Wood will concede only parts of it are "all right."

Like Mies van der Rohe, he knows

God is in the details. There is not a line, a move, a prop or a costume that Wood has not examined carefully nor, for that matter, a fellow actor. He confesses: "I'm forever haunting dressing rooms and saying 'what about...?'" He never stops working on Henry Carr. "It's like having ten fingers and 30 strands of silk and being told to make a sock." Unwinding after a performance is torture. Says Stoppard: "There are nights when I go backstage after what I think is a good performance, only to find John swearing and weeping and insisting that everything had gone wrong."

Wood never actually decided to become an actor and expose himself to such anguish. The son of a middle-class family from the Midlands, he studied law at Oxford before chucking it to try directing. He became an actor "to find out what they did." His first role in an undergraduate production was Richard HI; his acting was described by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times as "a frightening, powerful performance."

Cuckolded Dentist. Wood frightened his colleagues too. First the Old Vic, then the Royal Court wanted little part of him. He found them, in turn, unbearably clubby. He decided to go into television. "I played the classics," he says. "I thought it was the way to build a reputation, but the audience got tired of me." By 1967 Wood was tired too. "I thought I'd never find a playwright whose work I liked." Then he was sent Teeth, a television comedy by an unknown named Tom Stoppard. Wood played a cuckolded dentist who turned his rival's teeth green. Shortly afterward, Wood starred on Broadway in Stoppard's first stage hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Establishment again beckoned; the RSC had asked Wood four times before he agreed to join them. To his relief, "they accepted me completely." The RSC is now home. He can do what he wants: an iconoclastic Brutus in 1972, then the suave, icy Sherlock Holmes last year. The company even helped him buy a house. Now he has moved his wife Sylvia and their three children to the mellow-stoned Cotswolds town of Chipping Camden, where walking down the street is "like listening to Mozart--organic, inevitable but totally unexpected."

Wood is not relaxing, however. His life seems fragile. As a teenager, he spent 15 months in hospital after a car crash that left him with one leg shorter than the other; drafted into the army, he was accidentally shot in the back. In 1969 he had a major cancer operation. "I have apprehended death. It releases vitality." Now he is pacing himself like a champion aiming for a final thrust at supremacy. "I hate being called 'in fashion.' I've earned my success," he says. 'I've been 22 years in this business, 18 of them by the generosity of my bank manager, without whom I'd have been a bank manager."

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