‘Travesties’: The Way It Was (or How He Recalls It)

NEW YORK — Senility is a joyride in the exultant, London-born revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” which opened Tuesday night at the American Airlines Theater. This account of a clash of three cultural titans — James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara — in Zurich during World War I is related decades later by an ancient witness (one Henry Carr, of the British Consulate). His recollection is, to put it kindly, capricious.

Yet the mind of this old man (played with a gourmand’s gusto by Tom Hollander) is filled with such bright bits of history, real and imagined, that whenever he tries to remember, his thoughts erupt like showers of confetti. My advice to anyone attending this show of rollicking intellect and silly stagecraft, which has been deliciously directed by Patrick Marber: Let it rain and soak it in.

By evening’s end, you’ll be surprised by the iridescent clarity that has emerged from Stoppard’s artfully chaotic assemblage of rampant speculation, literary texts, great-man biography parodies, legal documents, political tracts and rude schoolboy japes. That clarity won’t last, any more than a rainbow does.

What abides is a giddy awareness of history as a tale told by unreliable narrators, as well as the oddly comforting impression that senescence has its own poetic license. As presented here, “Travesties” is a work to remember, or misremember, for years to come.

This geriatric evocation of things past was the work of a fast-rising playwright who was still on the fair side of 40. When “Travesties” opened in London in 1974, Stoppard was already the darling of theatergoing literati and irreverently bookish college students, thanks to the earlier success of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (his 1966 gloss on “Hamlet” from a sideways perspective) and “Jumpers” (an acrobatic riff on physics and philosophy from 1972).

It was already clear that Stoppard was a dramatist of a singular intellectual stripe, with his academic antics and cascading epigrams, suggesting a genius prankster run amok in an Oxbridge library. But nothing prepared his audience for “Travesties,” which made comic hay of the writings of three of the most eminent and complex minds of Western civilization. (Make that four, since the play also borrows copiously from Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.”)

When the show transferred to Broadway in 1975, it won both the Tony and New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards for best play. But theatergoers were walking out on it in exasperated droves and writing angry letters to The New York Times, which had happily endorsed the production.

The current “Travesties” — which originated at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2016, before transferring to the West End — is the product of several subsequent decades of Stoppard’s revision and condensation. (If I tried to track those changes for you, I’d wind up as addled as poor Carr.)

I would venture that this latest incarnation is the clearest and surely one of the liveliest on record. It should prove ridiculously entertaining for anyone with even a passing knowledge of its central characters, and a stroll through the groves of Wikipedia should offer adequate preparation for anyone else.

Because what makes “Travesties” so deeply engaging — and hilarious and touching — isn’t its flashy erudition but its author’s rapt fascination with the workings of the human mind and its enduring relationship with art. Stoppard possesses the enthusiasm of an eternal student, both arrogant about what he knows and humble about what he doesn’t.

This sensibility is filtered through the backward-looking perspective of good old Carr (based on a real person), a thoroughly middle-class British consul who claims to have been in Zurich at a magic moment when Joyce (Peter McDonald), Tzara (Seth Numrich) and Lenin (Dan Butler) were all in residence. Carr is in his dressing gown and his dotage when we first meet him, thinking up ways to transform this improbable slice of history into a book.

Joyce — who is working on his novel “Ulysses” — and Lenin — nearing the end of his exile from Russia — can be found in the Zurich library, along with Lenin’s wife, Nadya (Opal Alladin). Tzara, chief exponent of the art of poetic anarchy, is there, too, because he has a crush on Joyce’s assistant, Gwendolen (Scarlett Strallen). Overseeing, and regularly shushing, the others is a librarian, one Cecily Cardew (Sara Topham).

Gwendolen and Cecily are the names of the rivalrous heroines of Wilde’s “Earnest.” And much of the dialogue in “Travesties” takes its cues from that masterpiece of elegant absurdism. You see, Joyce is involved in a local production of “Earnest.” He recruits Carr to appear in it as Algernon. The collaboration ends badly, because of an altercation over the cost of Carr’s costumes.

The elderly Carr doffs his bathrobe to become his younger self to participate in his encounters with the others, who also include his manservant, Bennett (Patrick Kerr), who harbors revolutionary sympathies. Many of the scenes are enacted in several variations, as history stops and starts and never exactly repeats itself. Our leading men face off in duels of words about the purpose and nature of art. Carr, a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, takes the conventional bourgeois view of it as a collection of worthy monuments. Lenin has no use for art, though his wife describes him as being unnervingly moved by a Beethoven sonata. Tzara, the Dadaist, is a desecrater of traditional art, and is seen cutting up a sonnet by Shakespeare into a bowler hat, the better to randomly reassemble its words.

The hat belongs to Joyce, who later pulls a rabbit out of it. That bit of magic may give you a clue as to where the playwright’s sympathies lie.

Abstract considerations are rendered with an extravagantly theatrical zeal that never flags. The first-rate design team includes Tim Hatley (costumes and a set that suggests a ransacked library of the mind) Neil Austin (lighting) and Adam Cork (sound and music).

The cast couldn’t be much better. Among the singular pleasures they provide: Numrich’s physically ferocious Tzara acting out the Darwinian chain of evolution; McDonald’s Joyce talking (and singing) in Irish limericks; Butler’s straight-faced modeling a blond wig as a disguise for Lenin’s return to Russia; Alladin singing an ode to the motherland in Russian; and Strallen and Topham blissfully reinterpreting the tea party scene from “Earnest” to the tune of the vaudeville ditty “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean.”

Then there is Hollander, who was so delectably vicious in HBO’s “The Night Manager.” Here, standing amid a scattered wreckage of books and loose papers, he is both an affecting emblem of bewilderment and a tower of preening vanity. And he leads us with seamless clarity not only through his character’s segues between youth and old age but also through the decomposing labyrinth that is Carr’s mind.

“Take no notice,” he says companionably, after describing the Lenin he remembers as a gnomic, anemic blond. It will, he reassures us, “all come out in the wash, that’s the art of it.” What emerges from the churning wash of “Travesties” is one of the sweetest, sauciest and strangest defenses of art ever to land on a stage.

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‘Travesties’

Through June 17 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

By Tom Stoppard; directed by Patrick Marber; sets and costumes by Tim Hatley; lighting by Neil Austin; sound and original music by Adam Cork; hair and wigs by David Brian Brown; movement by Polly Bennett; production stage manager, Bess Marie Glorioso; production management, Aurora Productions; general manager, Denise Cooper; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis. Presented by Roundabout Theater Company, Tod Haimes, artistic director/CEO, Julia C. Levy, executive director, Sydney Beers, general manager, Steven Dow, chief administrative officer, in association with Chocolate Factory Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions.

Cast: Tom Hollander (Henry Carr), Seth Numrich (Tristan Tzara), Sara Topham (Cecily), Peter McDonald (James Joyce), Scarlett Strallen (Gwendolen), Opal Alladin (Nadya), Dan Butler (Lenin) and Patrick Kerr (Bennett).