Wacky Wilde Travesty: The Importance of being Eccentric.

Travesties, Tom Stoppard’s intellectual exercise about the literary and political co-ordinates of  art  and Oscar Wilde  playing  at the Segal Centre until May 3  Is a polished, but exhausting three hour excursion into the surreal.. Unless you are familiar with the origins of Dadaism and the cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, know something of the precious personality of James Joyce and have studied  Vladimir Lenin’s revolutionary ideas,  this scholarly,  highbrow  drawing room comedy isn’t always easily accessible. 

There is much, much more going on in on in this chaotic production as well.   It is overloaded with talk, much of it too clever by half, and demands a familiarity not only with Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, but with  Shakespeare,  Gilbert and Sullivan and early 20th century European history. 

Give the Segal full marks, however, for staging Stoppard  in a season that has featured a string of commercially successful  musicals.   If it at all succeeds, (and it does on several levels)  it  is largely because of  Greg  Ellwand’s  portrayl  of Henry Carr, a British diplomat living in Switzerland in 1917  who once played the role of Algernon in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest.  During his posting,  Carr claims to have met  James Joyce, Lenin and the poet Tristan Tzara, who were all in Zurich that year. But in matters of detail and chronology, in his  telling of the  story, Carr’s memory is a little weak 

With wry wit and wonky warmth  Ellwand manages to convince us that he exists in two periods at once – the past and the present. . Martin Sims’ brings a loopy intensity to the role of the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara.  Jon Lachlan Stewart is pricelessly petulant as James Joyce, who is trying to raise money to stage a production of Wile’s play.  Daniel Lillford certainly looks like Lenin who gets to parody Wilde’s epigram about losing one’s parents:  “To lose one revolution maybe regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. “ 

Ellen David as Lenin’s wife,  Nadya  and Anne Cassar as Carr’s younger sister, Gwendolen make the best of their periferal  roles.  Chala Hunter’s Cecily, the repressed librarian with a burlesque bent brings a hilarious sexual charge to the proceedings.  Pierre Brault plays the butler, Bennett, to perfection, wandering into this show, as he does from Wilde’s play.

Jacob Tierney, who has a distinguished career as an actor, director and screenwriter (Shakespeare in Love, The Trotsky) juggles the absurdities of the script deftly. But he is not the first director to be compromised by the Segal’s stage.  Set designer Pierre Etienne  Locas has made questionable use of the playing area,  opening the back wall of the theatre to the street  for no apparent reason,  then shuttering  the view with drapes and two enormous bookcases that slide back and forth above the eight rather awkward playing levels.  Louise Bourret’s period costumes are elegantly Edwardian. It’s all been lit poetically by Nicholas Descoteaux.   Dimitri Marine’s sound design helps to focus attention on the action when things get a little sluggish.  

By the time the evening comes to an end it would seem that the point Stoppard has been trying to make with his linguistic gymnastics  is summed up in Carr’s coda,  ““you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist. secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary.” 

Wacky Wilde Travesty: The Importance of being Eccentric.

Alan Hustak

Travesties, Tom Stoppard’s intellectual exercise about the literary and political co-ordinates of  art  and Oscar Wilde  playing  at the Segal Centre until May 3  Is a polished, but exhausting three hour excursion into the surreal.. Unless you are familiar with the origins of Dadaism and the cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, know something of the precious personality of James Joyce and have studied  Vladimir Lenin’s revolutionary ideas,  this scholarly,  highbrow  drawing room comedy isn’t always easily accessible. 

There is much, much more going on in on in this chaotic production as well.   It is overloaded with talk, much of it too clever by half, and demands a familiarity not only with Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, but with  Shakespeare,  Gilbert and Sullivan and early 20th century European history. 

Give the Segal full marks, however, for staging Stoppard  in a season that has featured a string of commercially successful  musicals.   If it at all succeeds, (and it does on several levels)  it  is largely because of  Greg  Ellwand’s  portrayl  of Henry Carr, a British diplomat living in Switzerland in 1917  who once played the role of Algernon in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest.  During his posting,  Carr claims to have met  James Joyce, Lenin and the poet Tristan Tzara, who were all in Zurich that year. But in matters of detail and chronology, in his  telling of the  story, Carr’s memory is a little weak 

With wry wit and wonky warmth  Ellwand manages to convince us that he exists in two periods at once – the past and the present. . Martin Sims’ brings a loopy intensity to the role of the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara.  Jon Lachlan Stewart is pricelessly petulant as James Joyce, who is trying to raise money to stage a production of Wile’s play.  Daniel Lillford certainly looks like Lenin who gets to parody Wilde’s epigram about losing one’s parents:  “To lose one revolution maybe regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. “ 

Ellen David as Lenin’s wife,  Nadya  and Anne Cassar as Carr’s younger sister, Gwendolen make the best of their periferal  roles.  Chala Hunter’s Cecily, the repressed librarian with a burlesque bent brings a hilarious sexual charge to the proceedings.  Pierre Brault plays the butler, Bennett, to perfection, wandering into this show, as he does from Wilde’s play.

Jacob Tierney, who has a distinguished career as an actor, director and screenwriter (Shakespeare in Love, The Trotsky) juggles the absurdities of the script deftly. But he is not the first director to be compromised by the Segal’s stage.  Set designer Pierre Etienne  Locas has made questionable use of the playing area,  opening the back wall of the theatre to the street  for no apparent reason,  then shuttering  the view with drapes and two enormous bookcases that slide back and forth above the eight rather awkward playing levels.  Louise Bourret’s period costumes are elegantly Edwardian. It’s all been lit poetically by Nicholas Descoteaux.   Dimitri Marine’s sound design helps to focus attention on the action when things get a little sluggish.  

By the time the evening comes to an end it would seem that the point Stoppard has been trying to make with his linguistic gymnastics  is summed up in Carr’s coda,  ““you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist. secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary.”