The Menier Chocolate Factory's new production of Tom Stoppard's TRAVESTIES broke their box office records by selling out ahead of its first preview.
If you missed out on tickets there’ll be another chance to see it when it transfers to the West End in February next year with TV star Tom Hollander reprising his role as Henry Carr, a minor British diplomat in Zurich in 1917 who encounters a surreal mob of fictional and real life characters.
TRAVESTIES is one of those extraordinarily engaging plays that intrigues and entertains even if, as many intelligent people admit, it leaves you baffled as to quite what point it’s making. Whether you leave confused or informed even watching the show makes you feel smart and sophisticated.
It’s not the only hit play that thrills its audience with a baffling scenario indeed some writers have made a career from doing this.
Harold Pinter’s play NO MAN'S LAND is currently playing at the Wyndham’s Theatre with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as two old men engaged in some kind of power struggle but what’s at stake and who exactly they are is kept ambiguous. This sense of uncertainty is unsettling and characterises all of Pinter’s work.
Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT is constantly revived and its scenario in which two tramps wait for someone who never arrives has inspired actors and directors to interpret it in many different ways. Personally I find the rambling ambiguity tedious but no one can deny that the frustration and powerlessness it conveys speaks to people all over the world even if they may not be able to make literal sense of it.
The musical CANDIDE has an exceptional score by Leonard Bernstein with Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and is regularly revived in tunefully and highbrow productions. It’s based on a philosophical allegory by Voltaire and encompasses many surreal and unfathomable characters and scenarios. None the less it’s great fun trying to figure out how it all stacks up as an exploration of fate and redemption.
And of course any play by SHAKESPEARE is open to countless interpretations which explains why his work remains timeless and speaks to successive generations whilst the rationale behind past productions can seem alien to contemporary thinking.
It’s fun to be baffled. Treat your brain to an intellectual work out and snap up some tickets to TRAVESTIES when it’s revived at the Apollo Theatre from 15 February to 29 April, with previews from 3 February 2017.
The actor Rufus Sewell has been very busy recently and you can currently enjoy two superb pieces of TV acting by him. He is impossibly handsome and utterly terrifying in the Amazon Prime hit, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, as a Nazi Officer and impossibly handsome and adorably kind in ITV’s VICTORIA in which he plays Queen Victoria’s first love, Lord Marlborough.