Il costo dell’utopia: Stoppard e il 1917

The essay focuses on Travesties, a play by Tom Stoppard, which can be read as an example of the playwright’s dramatic method. Originating from the discovery of a series of factual coincidences and based on the simultaneous presence of intertextual references, the play is set in neutral Zurich during World War 1 and at the outbreak of the Russian revolution, in the year 1917. The main topic is the relationship between history, or life, and art. Four different, and mutually exclusive, intellectual positions are shown, embodied by the main characters – Joyce, Tzara, Lenin, and Henry Carr, a conservative employee of the British Consulate. The whole story seems to take place in the rambling memory of Carr in his old age thus shifting between two time levels. In the background, the underlying scheme is that of The Importance of Being Earnest by Wilde, with its witty elegance and its ingenious plot. Critics have long sought to find out which of his four characters Stoppard sides with, as regards the function of art in history and in society. This essay considers a fifth position as likely to be the closest to the author’s: that of Wilde and of his aesthetic and political ideas on individualism, freedom, and on parody and nonsense as a means to communicate true and serious messages.