In Zurich during World War I, British diplomat Henry Carr played Algernon in an amateur production of Oscar Wilde’s drawing-room comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. The theatre company’s unlikely business administrator was Irish writer James Joyce and, like all good farces, the legend of the petty lawsuits Joyce and Carr filed against each other (over some comp tickets and the expensive trousers Carr bought as part of his costume — Joyce was a total stickler) outlives Carr’s performance as the quintessential bachelor aesthete.

Decades later, British playwright Tom Stoppard twigged that Zurich in the early-20th century was crawling with pre-eminent cultural figures, including Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, and poet/performance artist Tristan Tzara, who wrote one of the earliest Dadaist manifestos, declaring “every spectator is a plotter.” Though it is unlikely the three revolutionary figures were ever in the same room together, their proximity and shared radical zeal inspired Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties, which opens Soulpepper’s 2009 season Feb. 12.
Despite their undeniable influences, the particular revolutionary paths laid out by Joyce, Tzara and Lenin have become mostly overgrown; contemporary readers have only so much patience for obtuse Joycean paragraphs or for Tzara’s scrambled verse experiments. As for Lenin’s revolutionary communism — go ask Mikhail Gorbachev. Like Che, all three have become icons, distilled almost to stereotype. But they had plenty to say about art and Stoppard sets up an intellectual round robin among them, told by Carr through hazily recalled flashbacks. Stoppard uses a barrage of artistic devices — the structure of Earnest, the nonsensical language of Dada and even a few dashes of Shakespeare — both to parody and to celebrate cleverness and creativity.

“In our time, we’re still talking constantly about the value of art,” says director Joseph Ziegler, who most recently directed Frost/Nixon for Halifax’s Neptune Theatre. “Just think of last autumn with Stephen Harper’s budget cuts, when there were huge arguments about the value of art and artists.”

Stoppard clearly sides with Joyce, the play’s most convincing proponent of art for art’s sake: by the end of act one, the Irishman has taken over. The original version of the play was more openly contemptuous of the idea that art should be socially useful, but after the collapse of Soviet communism, Stoppard did a rewrite (which is the version Soulpepper is producing), cutting down Lenin’s role and treating him less seriously. There’s no sense kicking at a character whose idea has effectively lost the culture war.

“In 1974, what Lenin had to say about art was too formidable to be travestied,” says Ziegler. “But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stoppard could treat it with more humour.”

One of the ironies of Travesties is that it uses its dense mesh of cultural and historical references mostly for laughs. Ziegler himself researched the play by reading, among other things, Joyce’s Ulysses — many a bookshelf’s Mount Everest — which he had started several times before and had failed to finish. But he doesn’t think a book-reading, gallery-going audience needs to do homework to enjoy Travesties’ humour. It’s a matter of going with the flow and letting the language take you along to the party.

“One character asks about Dadaism and there’s a 30-second sketch of it in reply,” says Ziegler. “We don’t want people to go home and say they learned a lot about Dada or the Russian Revolution. We want them to enjoy it.”