Free Travesties by Tom Stoppard Page A

servants.
    CARR : You are quite right to do so. Most of them are without scruples.
    CECILY : In the socialist future, no one will have any.
    CARR : So I believe. To whom did this manservant pass the Consul’s correspondence?
    CECILY : Your brother Jack. Oh dear, there I go again! You are not a bit like your brother. You are more English.
    CARR : I assure you I am as Bulgarian as he is.
    CECILY : He is Romanian.
    CARR : They are the same place. Some people call it the one, some the other.
    CECILY : I didn’t know that, though I always suspected it.
    CARR : Anyway, now that
Earnest
has opened, no doubt the Consul will relieve his servant of diplomatic business. In all fairness, he did have a personal triumph in a most demanding role.
    CECILY :
Earnest??
    CARR : No – the other one.
    CECILY : What do you mean by
Earnest
?
    CARR :
The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde.
    CECILY : Wilde?
    CARR : You know him?
    CECILY : No, in literature I am only up to G. But I’ve heard of him and I don’t like him. The life is the art, as Vladimir Ilyich always says.
    CARR : Ars longa, vita brevis, Cecily.
    CECILY : Let us leave his proclivities in the decent obscurity of a learned tongue, Mr Tzara. I was referring to the fact that Oscar Wilde was a bourgeois individualist and, so I hear, overdressed from habit to boot.
    CARR : From habit to boot?
    CECILY : And back again.
    CARR : He may occasionally have been a little over-dressed but he made up for it by being immensely uncommitted.
    CECILY : The sole duty and justification for art is social criticism.
    CARR : That is a most interesting view of the sole duty andjustification for art, Cecily, but it has the disadvantage that a great deal of what we call art has no such function and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.
    CECILY : In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society.
    CARR : No, no, no, no, no – my dear girl! – art doesn’t change society, it is merely changed by it.
(
From here the argument becomes gradually heated
.)
    CECILY : Art is a critique of society or it is nothing!
    CARR : Do you know Gilbert and Sullivan??!
    CECILY : I know Gilbert but not Sullivan.
    CARR : Well, if you knew
Iolanthe
like I know
Iolanthe
–
    CECILY : I doubt it –
    CARR :
Patience!
    CECILY : How dare you!
    CARR :
Pirates! Pinafore!
    CECILY : Control yourself!
    CARR :
Ruddigore!
    CECILY : This is a Public Library, Mr Tzara!
    CARR :
GONDOLIERS
,
Madam! (Another ‘time slip
…’)
    CECILY : I don’t think you ought to talk to me like that during library hours. However as the reference section is about to close for lunch I will overlook it. Intellectual curiosity is not so common that one can afford to discourage it. What kind of books were you wanting?
    CARR : Any kind at all. You choose. I should like you, if you would, to make it your mission to reform me. We can begin over lunch.
    CECILY : I’m afraid I am too busy to reform you today. You will have to reform yourself. Here is an article which I have been translating for Vladimir Ilyich. You may not be aware, MrTzara, that in the governments of Western Europe today there are ten Socialist ministers.
    CARR : I must admit my work has prevented me from taking an interest in European politics. But ten is certainly impressive.
    CECILY : It is scandalous. They are supporting an imperialist war. Meanwhile the real struggle, the class war, is being undermined by these revisionists like Kautsky and MacDonald.
    CARR (
Puzzled
): Do you mean Ramsay MacDonald, Cecily?
    CECILY : I don’t mean Flora Macdonald, Mr Tzara.
    CARR : But he’s an