Travesties

Saturday 28 July - 2:00pm
A performace at Pitlochry Theatre.

The Pitlochry Theatre website tells us: In his slightly shabby Zurich apartment, a minor British diplomat, Henry Carr, looks back in old age to his youth, and the summer of 1917, when the city of clocks was awash with spies, artists and subversives, and the First World War raged all around . . . And when - according to Henry - he appeared in a rather successful amateur production of The Importance Of Being Earnest directed by James Joyce, the giant of Irish letters. In which, Henry was able to choose his own trousers (such a pleasure!) and wear two complete changes of costume. And weren’t Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, and Lenin, the godfather of the Russian revolution, involved too? They were certainly there at the time. According to Henry . . . The problem is that Henry’s memory, like an unregulated clock, is a touch unreliable. And his memories have a habit of changing, even as he recounts them. Did Joyce really have a secretary called Gwendolyn? Was the Zurich Public Library really overseen by - wait for it - Cecily? When did the mad, charming Tzara become Jack to Henry’s Algy? And who turned the dour Joyce into Lady Bracknell. In this mis-remembered world, Henry gives himself a starring role in the political, artistic and literary revolutions that were to shape the 20th Century, whilst madcap, Dadaist mischief erupts all around, inspired by the spirit of St. Oscar. Stoppard’s award-winning 1974 comedy features high-wire feats of linguistic daring, allusion, word-play and pastiche. Make sure you catch this wild(ean), intensely entertaining mélange of art, literature, philosophy - and trousers!