Travesties

Synopsis

'Tom Stoppard's Travesties is witty, playful and wise.

Forty years on, it is starting to look timeless as well.' Sunday Times 'It is a champagne cocktail, compounded of a balletic nimbleness of invention, a bewildering intricacy of design which reaches the sublime heights where mathematics merge with poetry, and the audacious juggling of a master conjuror.' Sunday Telegraph 'A dazzling pyrotechnical feat that combines Wildean pastiche, political history, artistic debate, spoof reminiscence, and song-and-dance in marvellously judicious proportions.

The text itself is a Joycean web of literary allusions; yet it also radiates sheer intellectual joie de vivre, as if Stoppard were delightedly communicating the fruits of his own researches.' Guardian Travesties was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in June 1974.

This edition includes a new preface by the author, and revisions made by him for a revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, in October 2016.'