Travesties

Three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries - Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara - were all living in Zurich in 1917. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consular official, Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theatre and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Tom Stoppard spins this historial coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profounding influential men as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholly riveting memory of an ageing Henry Carr.