Travesties
Travesties,a comedy by T. Stoppard , performed 1974 , published 1975 .
The play is largely set, with various time shifts, in Zurich during the First World War, where Lenin , Joyce , and Tristan Tzara happened to be residing; they appear as characters, as does the marginally historical figure of Henry Carr ( 1894 – 1962 ), through whose memories much of the action is portrayed. Stoppard takes a minor incident from Ellmann 's life of Joyce, describing a semi-amateur performance in Zurich in 1918 of The Importance of Being Earnest , in which both Joyce and Carr were involved, and builds from it an extravaganza which plays on Wilde 's original (in terms of stylistic parody and of the plot of assumed and mistaken identities) to produce a theatrical, informative, and witty commentary on the birth of Dada , the writing of Ulysses , and the genesis of the doctrine of Socialist Realism , and...
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