Travesties

Literature and history are cut into pieces, put into a hat and selectively drawn out in Sydney Theatre Company's sparkling revival of a postmodern comedy classic.

As a neutral hub, Zurich attracted a lot of exiles during World War I. Among them were intellectual giants such as Romanian Tristan Tzara (Toby Schmitz), one of the inventors of the subversive art movement Dada; Irish author James Joyce (Peter Houghton), who would go on to write Ulysses, one of the key novels of the 20th century; and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin (William Zappa), leader of the Russian Bolsheviks. It was also home to non-entities such as Henry Carr (Jonathan Biggins), a minor English consular official whose only claim to fame is that he played the role of Algernon Moncrieff in a Zurich production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest that was staged by Joyce.

In Tom Stoppard's Travesties, the ageing Carr is recalling the above historical facts and getting them so muddled up it that the real-life characters talk and behave like the characters in Earnest. Sound complicated? It is. It's like a bomb going off in a library.

Which is entirely the point. Tzara, Joyce and Lenin were all revolutionaries in their fields - making 'travesties' of what came before. Carr's faulty memories are making a travesty both of what really happened, and of Oscar Wilde's play. The delightful fluff of Earnest becomes the egg white in which is suspended some of the most radical ideas of the 20th century. And all of it is filtered through the mind of a mischievous old codger who's losing the plot anyway (the American director and critic Charles Marowitz described Travesties as "a play within a monologue").

The Sydney Theatre Company revival of Stoppard's 1974 masterpiece arrives in time to make other plays look like intellectual and comedic wastelands. It's jam-packed with witticism, word games, allusion, erudition and also plain explanation - it never leaves you short of a context even at its most undergraduate. Biggins is on home turf here, strolling though proceedings like the gifted cerebral comedian he is. Houghton looks and talks eerily like James Joyce, while William Zappa adds some weight to the play with a portrayal of Lenin that is convincing even when the Communist leader is giving a rousing speech and telling the Russian peasantry that "to lose one revolution may be considered a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness."

The women aren't short changed in the play, even if history has deprived them of the spotlight. Blazey Best is giddily pompous as Tzara's secretary, whom Carr recalls as Wilde's Gwendolen. Rebecca Massey, as the alluring librarian Cecily, whom Carr is destined to marry, has great comic timing. (Gwendolen and Cecily's confrontation scene is sung to the tune of a music hall double-act, in another example of the play's jumbled-up logic.)

Richard Cottrell's direction is crisp and clever; Julie Lynch's costumes are dandier than even Wilde could have imagined; and Michael Scott Mitchell's set  - complete with strategically placed cuckoo clocks - is colourful, bright and festooned in relevant text, like an ABC Learning Centre for phenomenally gifted children.

This is a play you have to see - if only to witness major figures of the last century conversing for ten minutes entirely in limericks. But don't go unless you're familiar with The Importance of Being Earnest. To sit through this play without that crucial piece of background knowledge really would be a travesty.

Read our interview with Jonathan Biggins.