“Life and times, friend of the famous”: Henry Carr
The real-life figure and theatrical production that inspired Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES
Tom Stoppard’s Travesties — onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 8 through October 9, 2022 — brings together several real-life artists and revolutionaries in a comic collision. Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, and Vladimir Lenin are giants of their respective fields. But the least well-known of the real-life figures is the one who gets the biggest role in Stoppard’s comedy: our narrator, Henry Carr, official of the British Consular Office in Vienna, who found himself in Joyce’s orbit and attained immortality through it, though surely not the kind he would have wanted.
In his introduction to the printed script of Travesties, Stoppard includes a summary of an unusual episode in theater history. Henry Carr, an officer of the British Consular who was wounded in World War I and sent to Zürich to work, accepted the role of Algernon in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, produced by a writer with (at the time) mid-level fame: James Joyce. It was this production, and the legal squabbles that followed, that inspired both Stoppard and Joyce: Stoppard would spin an entire comic masterpiece out of it, while Joyce would lampoon his nemesis by depicting him as a foul-mouthed drunk in Ulysses.
Henry Carr was born in England in 1894. He volunteered for military service during World War I but was badly injured in France and taken prisoner by the Germans. They sent him for medical treatment at a monastery, and then he and several others were sent to Zürich in Switzerland, neutral during the war, where he worked as a low-level diplomat in the office of the British consulate. While in this job, he was tapped to join Joyce’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, playing the leading role of Algernon.
The Importance of Being Earnest is among the most famous works by Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. It is a comedy that mocks the mores and morals of Victorian structures, using frivolity, triviality, and high-spirited jokes. Carr played Algernon, the witty, charmingly amoral bachelor with a love of fine things. Over the course of the play, Algernon pretends to be Jack’s (imaginary) brother Ernest, while also spinning tales about his own imaginary friend, Bunbury, who he uses to get out of social occasions. Algernon pursues and eventually wins Jack’s ward, Cecily, while Jack wins Gwendolen’s love. It’s a delicate confection, so light and funny that one doesn’t notice the beautifully designed structure holding everything up.
Throughout The Importance of Being Earnest, and his work in general, Wilde explores the philosophical tension in the play about the practical and the aesthetic. By using Wilde’s play and Carr and Joyce’s real-life involvement in it as a frame, Stoppard is augmenting his own exploration of the same tension. Travesties gives us Joyce the modernist, Tzara the Dadaist, Lenin the revolutionary, and Carr the aesthete, concerned primarily with what clothes Algernon should wear and wooed to participate with the promise of costume changes. Art and revolution, practicality and aestheticism, meaning and nonsense — Stoppard’s arguments and his own play are so perfectly constructed and so very funny that one might not notice how well structured and dense they both are as well.
After barely surviving the horrors of World War I and settling into a quiet life in neutral Zürich, Carr may not have anticipated the specific sort of notoriety for which he was destined. After The Importance of Being Earnest, he and Joyce fell out over a dispute about actor pay and reimbursement for the trousers Carr bought for his costume. They sued and countersued each other, with legal battles continuing for years. Carr likely did not expect that the novel Joyce was working on all along would go on to be one of the most widely revered in the English language, or that he would make such an unflattering appearance in it.
He also could not have known that nearly 60 years later, one of the 20th centuries greatest dramatists would hang a whole play from the very thin string of this historical footnote. Stoppard ends his introduction by relaying that Carr’s widow, Noel, reached out to him after reading reviews of the play’s first production to share more biographical information — that Carr had a twin, that he had laid in no-man’s-land injured for five days before being taken prisoner, that he and Noel were bombed out during World War II and he returned to service to command the Home Guard. He had seen some of the very worst that humanity can do, but was still able to see the value in the perfect pair of well-tailored pants. How very Earnest.
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Travesties by Tom Stoppard is onstage September 8 through October 9, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
