On Tom Stoppard's Travesties

Tom Stoppard (1937--) was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, but grew up in Britain. He is a knowledgeable playwright. The subjects and contents of his dramas are comprehensively broad. People who are familiar with Tom Stoppard's life experience know that in his early days, he's been working as a newspaper reporter for approximately eight years. And this work experience helped him forming a highly logical way of thinking and a concise writing style. Later he started to write drama review. It was during this period that Tom Stoppard got enough time and precious opportunity to read large number of drama scripts. Close reading provides him with a relatively complete understanding of the history of British Drama and enables him to have a much more rational attitude towards his contemporary literary trends. The years of 1960s are the time when British Drama started to open itself up to the world. It was also during this historical period, Stoppard started to write his dramas. His plays not only tried to inherit the traditions of British Drama, but also constantly sublated the contemporary literary trends of his time. All of this did help Tom Stoppard shaping his unique theatrical writing style. After finding the uniqueness of many of his works I decided to take a close analysis on Tom Stoppard's works. This dissertation will mainly focus on analyzing the inclusivity and uniqueness of his drama:Travesties.Beside Chapter one, the main body of this dissertation contains two chapters which are further separated into four parts. Chapter one focuses on discussing the Superimposed Plot of Travesties. The main plot and some characters in Travesties were borrowed by Stoppard from Oscar Wilde's work, named The Important of Being Earnest. By doing so, Stoppard successfully captivated the audiences at the very beginning by inspiring them making comparison between these two plays. Meanwhile, because of his admiration for Oscar Wilde, Stoppard created huge amount of witty dialogues and puns which imitates the style of Wilde and some of them even much more precision and clever. Themes of Oscar Wilde's works are mostly on criticizing the hypocrisy of society. In Travesties, by presenting debates made by characters, Tom Stoppard effectively showed us audiences the hypocrisy existing within each social class. Chapter two focuses on discussing the highly logical but less-serious eloquence in Travesties. After the two World Wars, Tom Stoppard precisely discerned out the changes and tendency of British Comedy and tastes of the masses. People no longer so deeply preferred moral plays or educational plays and put much more attention on funny and relaxed comedy. Stoppard noticed such changes. In Travesties, the debates among the main characters showed great feature of George Bernard Shaw's Eloquence. But these debates do not aim at educating people. Each character expresses his standpoints which represents the social class he belongs to. But till the end of the play, Stoppard did not give us audiences any his own personal ideas. Discussing serious topics in a relaxed way is interpretated excellently in Travesties. Part three focuses on discussing the absurd elements in Travesties. When Nietzsche loudly declared to the world:"God is dead!", and when people realized that they have become slaves to money and the machines, and when lives were threaten by atomic bomb and nuclear weapons......Human being felt that they got lost. It seems that no matter what efforts them made are in vain. Everything became meaningless. In the opening part of Travesties, Tom Stoppard arranged many absurd elements to create an absurd atmosphere. And within the two ACTs, many more absurd elements are easily found everywhere. Through making comparison between Travesties and Waiting for Godot, one of the masterpieces of the Theatre of Absurd, we find that concerning with the absurd elements used by Stoppard, he do much more innovation than blindly imitation. Chapter Four focuses on discussing how Tom Stoppard puts Brecht's Alienation Techniques into use. By destroying the illusion effect created by traditional drama, Travesties successfully experimented what the new drama advocated. That is breaking the Echo Effect and made audiences keep rationally while watching the drama.