Bennett the Manservant (Tref Gare) and James Joyce the Writer (Johnathan Peck) Photograph by Christa Hill It might be nonsense, but at least it’s clever nonsense A review from Philip Harvey of Bloomsday in Melbourne’s production of ‘Travesties’ by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Jennifer Sarah Dean at fortyfivedownstairs 12-23 June 2019. A novelist, a bolshevik, and a dadaist walked into a bar, is one way of getting the joke that is Travesties. Or it’s a demonstration of how The Importance of Being Earnest is a Marxist tract. Or it’s a slideshow of linguistic fireworks in which any amount of explosive art talk does not get in the way of a fizzing Wildean epigram. The inventor of this literary party game said last year in The New Yorker that “the play is a kind of luxury, in which you pretend that James Joyce was there in Zurich at the same time as Lenin and Tristan Tzara. It’s a kind of intellectual entertainment.” Bloomsday in Melbourne chose to make Tom Stoppard’...