TRAVESTIES
Chelmsford Theatre Workshop at the Old Court
05.05.11

Stoppard's early piece - show-off fireworks and intellectual knockabout - imagines a meeting of minds in neutral Switzerland during the Great War.
This long-awaited revival, directed by Pete and Lois Jeary, sees Tristan Tzara en travesti,  James Joyce as a Limerick man on the scrounge,  cheese sandwiches and teacakes at the Consulate,  and a libidinous librarianess of Zurich.  Not to mention the Imprudence of Being ... not Ernest, the other one.

Jim Hutchon was at the opening night; this is his review for The Weekly News:

Co-directors Peter and Lois Jeary developed a strong narrative drive to bring together Tom Stoppard’s disjointed diatribe on politics, literature and modern art. In doing so they made sense of the piece and with many imaginative touches brought out much of its essential humour.

A senile diplomat Henry Carr (played by James Christie with impressive zest but not much comic timing) ‘remembers’ a vintage period in Zurich in WW1 where he befriended Lenin, James Joyce and the founder of the Dada modern art movement Tristan Tzara. Geoff Brown was suitably pompous as Lenin and Vikki Pead took on the self-important Tzara with appropriate intensity. Danny Segeth played a highly-convincing Joyce talking largely in limericks; in fact the funniest interchange of the evening was a 5-part dialogue in limericks, each finishing the others’ lines.

The text is shot through with allusions to Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and in amongst the serious ‘man talk’, there are the delightful airheads from Ernest, Gwendolen and Cecily played with aplomb by Catherine Hitchens and Catherine Bailey respectively, and a fine studied cameo from Michael Gray as Bennett the butler. There are a number of in-jokes and references to Earnest and the politics of the early 20^th Century, but a knowledge of these is not necessary to get real enjoyment from the evening.

photograph of Henry Carr [James Christie] courtesy of James Sabbarton