[While] Tom Stoppard's Travesties focuses quite clearly on The Importance of Being Earnest, it may, judging by the early critical returns, serve even better as an example of "The Pitfalls of Being Witty." The play (which has as part of its donné the difficulties arising from a wartime production of Wilde's play in Zurich) has been hailed as a comic masterpiece, which it is, and as a vindication of James Joyce, which it is not. Centering his attention on the interaction of the mythologies of Art (represented by Joyce), Political Revolution (represented by Lenin), and Radical Individualism (represented by Tristan Tzara), Stoppard unveils the limitations of the twentieth century's most cherished systems of belief. (p. 228)

Carr, a minor official at the British consulate in Zurich, stands firmly at the center of Travesties' thematic structure…. By installing Carr, in many ways a flawed, petty man, as the central stage...