Life, as you may have noticed, sometimes has a way of behaving as if there is a grand (or at least modestly intentional) design, as if behind the scenes there is a puppeteer pulling the strings, cackling wildly and shouting, "There SHALL be purpose!" The fact that this seeming order spirals out of human narcissism is by the bye. As Hamlet said, Madam, I know not seems. Appearance is all.

And thus it was that the god of theatre reviewing - a little known deity called Apogoitefsi - arranged for me to see Tom Stoppard's Travesties at the Sydney Theatre Company and Paul Galloway's Realism at the Melbourne Theatre Company on successive nights last week. (Don't even think about my carbon footprint over the past fortnight: I am doing penance, and planting trees as we speak...) Both are comedies about the revolutionary artistic movements of early 20th century Modernism. Both are fascinated by the Russian Revolution, although one features Lenin and the other (sort of) Stalin. And both, in their different ways, make very enjoyable theatre.


Travesties premiered in 1974, but it still seems the fresher play. It is Tom Stoppard at his brilliant best, a champagne confection of intellectual jokes underlaid by a serious questioning of the relationship between revolution and art. Realism, winner of last year's Wal Cherry award, is a premiere of a new Australian play and is a backstage comedy of a much more conventional stripe. It's hard to think that either play could have been given better treatment in its staging: in the case of Realism, the production glosses the flaws in the text, showing its virtues to their best advantage.

Aside from The Year of Magical Thinking, which is in any case an STC production, Realism is the first show this year that bears out the promise of the MTC's new incarnation. It reveals a playwright with a considerable gift for comic dialogue and an intimate knowledge of the stage; but it is first of all an act of theatre. The text is the occasion for the other artists - director, designers, actors - to shine in performance, and everyone grabs the spotlight and runs.

The play is set in Stalinist Russia in 1939, as a nervous bunch of actors rehearse a play written to celebrate Stalin’s birthday, horribly aware that a wrong step could mean deportation or death. Worse, a famous footballer with no experience of acting has been cast in the title role, and the director has gone missing. It's really a backstage comedy packed with theatrical jokes, in the tradition of Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval.

Joseph Stalin, General-Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1922 until his death in 1953, oversaw what must be the most massive project of social engineering in history. The numbers are dizzying. It’s estimated that Stalin caused the deaths of at least 20 million people (some argue the figure is closer to 40 million). This includes perhaps a million executed by secret police in purges, 12 million in labour camps, and 7 million peasants starved in famines caused by forced collectivisation.

Artists notoriously suffered under Stalin’s regime. What had been a thriving avant garde culture in the early years of the Revolution was ruthlessly decimated as the Soviet State cracked down on formalism and ambiguity, counter-revolutionary sins that were eradicated in favour of the bleak utilitarianism of social realism. Among the prominent casualties were the great novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (who wrote some of the most bitterly funny satires of Stalinist society), the poet Osip Mandelstam and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose revolutionary theatre was written out of history after he was arrested and executed by the secret police.

As Orlando Figes records in The Whisperers, a history of family life under Stalin that was recently banned in Russia, the effects filtered through to the most mundane levels of social intercourse, breaking the bonds of social trust: anyone, from one's own child child to a casual work acquaintance, could be an informer. Driven by shame and fear, Soviet citizens internalised the regime's imperatives, even when they were victims of them. "No other totalitarian system," says Figes, "had such a profound impact on the private lives of its subjects."

Although we are told this is the case, Realism doesn't really explore this aspect of Stalinism. Galloway's characters are all remarkably unguarded; even when the playwright Babelev (John Leary) discovers that the footballer Glemov (Stephen Phillips) is a friend of KGB head Beria, it doesn't shut him up, and the garrulous actors are shocked when they discover a potential informer in their midst, although by 1939 such a discovery must have been routine. For the sake of the comedy, the interior lives of the characters on stage are much the same as the average contemporary westerner.

All the same, you accept the conceit, if only because of the energy of the performances and the ambition of the production, directed with a near-faultless eye by Peter Evans. The play itself is structurally solid, if marred by an over-anxious desire to explain. This creates dud moments where nothing much is going on, and a sense of clunkiness in the flow of the action. But I liked the reflexiveness in the writing, its willingness to make jokes about itself (an actor complaining to another that she has upstaged him is, for example, upstaged as he complains). And Galloway has the gift of a first-class cast, led by Miriam Margoyles as the senior actress Nadia, who fully exploit its comedic potential.

More interestingly, Realism is an exploration of Meyerhold's theatrical practice. (Spoilers follow: anyone interested in seeing this play should stop reading now.) It begins in a naturalistic style, which is neverthless soaked with a subtle formalism: actorly stances or groupings signal a heightened state of theatrical reality, and Stephen Curtis's apparently naturalistic set, with its flywheels and faux mechanics, is in fact a tribute to Lubov Popova's constructivist design for Meyerhold's 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold.

The first overt shift occurs when the actor Dinsky (Grant Piro) gives another actor a demonstration of Meyerhold's physical training system, Biomechanics, which, with its strange mixture of heiroglyphic Egyptian gesture and Tai Chi, is much stranger and more beautiful than you might expect. Suddenly we are watching pure performance, the actor's rhythmic body moving in space, and its power reduces the audience to silence. But the real coup de théâtre occurs when the stage transforms without warning into a Meyerholdian production, a stylised play-within-a-play that enacts the story of Meyerhold's life. This is much more than a gesture; although it occurs perilously late in proceedings, the production holds its nerve and carries the action through. It's bold, spectacular theatre.

Realism lacks the intellectual confidence to play robustly with its ideas: it is still about them, rather than of them. But nobody could accuse Tom Stoppard of a lack of intellectual confidence. Travesties, one of Stoppard's best plays, is all dazzling conceit.

Stoppard's imagination was sparked by an unlikely historical confluence during World War 1, when Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin simultaneously took refuge in Zurich. The play is filtered through the unreliable memory of Henry Carr, a minor consular official who starred as Algernon in an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest, put on by a company that was managed by James Joyce. In the wake of the play, Joyce sued Carr over money owed on some tickets he was supposed to sell; then Carr counter-sued Joyce, claiming that he had spent a lot of money on his trousers. And then Joyce sued Carr for defamation, although that action was thrown out of court.

It's not hard to see why this improbably comic story fascinated Stoppard. And nobody else could have exploited it with such verve: the script romps joyously through a pastiche of Wilde's play, with Tristan Tzara (a bravura performance by Toby Schmitz) playing Ernest to Carr's Algernon. Dialogue breaks out in limericks or music hall song like some surreal version of Tourette's Syndrome. It is, as is always said about Stoppard, enormously clever: clever enough to demonstrate that "clever" and "glib" are not synonyms. At his best, Stoppard is all Wildean surface, polished to a brilliant profundity: and here he is at his best.

Underneath the froth is a serious question about the uneasy relationship between art and revolution. Although Tzara and Joyce were both, in different ways, revolutionary artists, they were products of bourgeois culture; Joyce was famously indifferent to politics, and even claimed, in a paranoid moment, that the world war was a plot against his novels. "You're an amiable bourgeois with a chit from matron," Carr says to Tzara. "And if the revolution came, you wouldn't know what hit you." ("That's what we have against this society," responds Tzara, "that it has a place for us in it...")

There are ominous hints of the Russian Revolution's later persecution of Modernist artists in the dogma that all art must be social critique. But in this little bubble of time, before these famous names became cultural and political monuments, everything is up for grabs: the utter nihilism of war rages in the background, and art is - can't but be - a nonsense. Even if it is, as a coach once said of football, a very serious nonsense.

Richard Cottrell, who directed an unexpectedly disarming play about the Goons a couple of years ago, directs a superb production for the STC. Jonathan Biggins in the central role of Henry Carr leads a brilliant comic cast, all walking the uneasily hilarious line between cartoon and parody (none of these characters, except possibly Carr, are at all real: they are products of Carr's unreliable memory, phantasms of his romantic imagination - at one stage he recalls Lenin as a blond Scandinavian). They are, basically, functions of text - both Stoppard's and the source writings behind it. The stage - a revolve designed by Michael Scott-Mitchell, with an exaggerated art nouveau apartment on one side and a library adorned with random text on the other - is a heightened simulacra of Carr's mind, with his stuttering memory punctuated by changing lighting states and absurd cuckoo clocks.

What this production realises gloriously is the brilliant theatricality of Stoppard's writing. For all its frenetic shifts, Cottrell's direction uncovers a beautiful clarity; the density of Stoppard's linguistic play requires concentration, but is delivered with its proper lightness. I was laughing too much to realise how hard I was working to follow the dialogue. Which is probably the highest compliment I can pay.

A shorter version of the review of Realism was published in yesterday's Australian.

Realism by Paul Galloway, directed by Peter Evans. Set design by Stephen Curtis, costume design by Christina Smith, lighting design by Matt Scott. With Stephen Phillips, Julie Eckersley, Paul Denny, Miriam Margoyles, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Grant Piro, John Leary and Ming-Zhu Hii. MTC @ the John Sumner Theatre until May 17.

Travesties by Tom Stoppard, directed by Richard Cottrell. Set design by Michael Scott-Mitchell, costume design by Julie Lynch, lighting design by Bernie Tan. With Robert Alexander, Blazey Best, Jonathan Biggins, Peter Houghton, Rebecca Massey, Toby Schmitz, Wendy Strehlow and William Zappa. STC @ the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until April 25.

Rock’n’Roll by Tom Stoppard, directed by Simon Phillips. Designed by Stephen Curtis, costumes by Tracy Grant Lord, lighting by Matt Scott, A/V by Josh Burns, sound design by Kerry Saxby. With Chloe Armstrong, Christopher Brown, Melinda Butel, Grant Cartwright, Danielle Cormack, Alex Menglet, Matthew Newton, Genevieve Picot, Richard Sydenham and William Zappa. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, until March 29, Sydney Theatre Company April 11-May 10. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

It’s kind of weird to scroll through the pull-quotes for the Broadway season of Rock’n’Roll, Tom Stoppard’s unstoppable hit about, well, everything except rock and roll. The critics reach for their superlatives and then keep hopping up ever more vertiginous cliffs of fancy. I know I start foaming at moments of excitement, but this mass froth-fest could float a Titanic.

“Triumphantly sentimental,” cries Ben Brantley of the New York Times. “Rock’n’Roll is arguably Stoppard’s finest play. He is a magician, and this is a passionately acted, decades-spanning tale of love, revolution and music. …Stoppard treats the characters of for Rock’n’Roll with a deep affection I've never encountered from him before.” Clives Barnes of the New York Post hands it four stars and says it is "funny and enthralling". “Rock’n’Roll offers you something to take out of the theater you didn’t come in with… revealing the human face of Stoppard behind all the nervy, nervous brilliance.” While Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal finds it “an intellectually challenging, intensely theatrical piece of work that is destined to be talked about wherever playgoers gather.”

Though a mere drop of what’s out there, that is probably enough lurv; if you want more, you can google the reviews yourself. It’s a fair sampling of how Rock’n’Roll has been received by critics in the US and Britain. Of course, my worthy colleagues were speaking of Trevor Nunn’s production, which opened to similar plaudits at the Royal Court in London before doing Broadway business in New York; but I’m certain that Simon Phillips has directed the same play.

I can’t really fault Phillips’ production at the Playhouse. Brilliantly cast, swift, economical, and stylish, it demonstrates the kind of panache that was missing from Phillips’s directorial vocabulary all through 2007. Stephen Curtis’s design wisely eschews Nunn's revolve in favour of a concert stage dominated by a huge screen, on which is projected a collage of documentary footage – the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in, even (briefly) the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. These shift when necessary to scenic backdrops such as Cambridge oak trees or Prague buildings thrusting up through snow, with tables and chairs being whizzed on and off stage by the actors. It all works, and sometimes it works very well indeed.

And then there’s the play. The problem is, I just don’t get it. Let me, for the briefest moment, place my glasses over your eyes. Rock’n’Roll looks to me like a rather pedestrian history play. It plods through the final decades of the 20th century, with the odd burst of Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd adding a brief glamour to grim images such as the Soviet tanks in the streets of 1968 Prague. With the exception of a couple of undeniably powerful moments, I simply don’t understand why it’s made rational people go weak at the knees. Maybe it's just a function of nostalgia for the 1960s. Maybe you had to be there.

Stoppard gives us a potted history of Czechoslovakia’s adventures behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, through the figure of the dissident rock and roll fan Jan (Matthew Newton). Simultaneously, he follows the fortunes of a small family in Cambridge, friends of Jan – the classics professor Eleanor (Genevieve Picot) and her grumpy Communist husband Max (William Zappa). And in between the familial and social histories, we are told how the anarchic wisdom of the body, the joyous, erotic freedom of rock and roll, is the real revolutionary beat of the 20th century.

Punk, briefly the most anarchic music of them all, scarcely scores a mention. The closest we get is The Cure. I’m not enough of a rock snob to follow the semiotics of this, but somehow it is of a piece with the play. Punk wasn’t nice and – when it started, anyway, which was also more or less when it finished – it was about poor kids. This is not a play about poor people, in the same way it’s not about rock music. It’s about people who worry about poor people, and who have record collections. It talks about passion, which can often be mistaken for passion itself, but – as Osip Mandelstam once said of some unfortunate poet – the sheets are unruffled: the muse has not spent the night.

Rock’n’Roll is by no means a great play, and certainly nowhere near Stoppard’s best. I’m not even sure if it’s a good play. It’s just... determined. You know that Czechoslovakia is going to get the Rolling Stones, and by gum they do; and freedom radiates everywhere, as if the Stones were the model of democratic equity.

Stoppard wisely stops history in 1990 - before the Balkan Wars, the razing of Grozny, the rise of the Russian Mafia and the increasing tyranny of Putin’s leadership can make his thesis about capitalism’s essential benevolence a little strained. You can see that a little handkerchief is fluttering for British decency and oddness, which is so much nicer than almost anything else. The faithful old Cambridge Marxist Max (William Zappa) is politically compromised and ideologically wrong, but underneath it all, he's really a loveable chap.

There is one extraordinary speech from Eleanor, who is dying of cancer, which is delivered with such passion by Genevieve Picot that the hair stood up on my neck. And the other real moment of the play also belongs to Picot, this time as Eleanor’s daughter Esme. Both are moments when eros becomes more than an interesting word, but rather the vital, dangerous and powerful force that underlies life itself.

But these come out of nowhere. Between them are many tedious set pieces where different characters argue about, for instance, What Went Wrong With The Revolution in a kind of sub-Trevor Griffiths way, or in which we’re clunkily given the intellectual subtext (Pan, Eros, Sappho and Pink Floyd versus Marxist collective consciousness and the Eastern European police state).

Phillips has such a good cast that they mostly make a silk hearing aid out of the sow’s ear. They can’t transform the script into something it's not, but they create a fluid dynamic on stage that injects a lot of pleasure into watching the production. There are no weak performances: besides Picot, who reminds us that she is a major talent who is not seen enough on our stages, I enjoyed Matthew Newton’s portrayal of Jan, the reluctant Czech dissident who, in spite of himself, finds that wanting to listen to rock music is a subversive activity, and Chloe Armstrong's disarmingly passionate performances as the young flower-child Esme and Esme’s daughter Alice.

There are a couple of excellent thumbnail sketches: Grant Cartwright’s vivid appearance as the new generation Cambridge Marxist, and Danielle Cormack as the Czech intellectual exile, Lenka. William Zappa bears the brunt of Stoppard’s desire to turn drama into a history of ideology, and all I can say is, he does his best, finding life even there. But with all this talent, all this energy, all this style and money, it’s still an ordinary play.

There’s a very strange scene in which Stoppard makes a clumsy attempt at Pinteresque menace, and achieves something rather like the Monty Python sketch where Inquisition victims are threatened with a comfy chair (or, in this case, a stale biscuit). Our dissident’s record collection is smashed up, but we understand nothing about his prison sentence: everything remains at the level of idea. You no more feel the visceral terror of the secret police (as you do, say, in Kafka’s The Trial or Ismael Kadare's The Palace of Dreams) than you want to get up and dance.

It did make me wonder why I wouldn’t be better off reading a book. A decent post-war history and Anne Carson’s excellent book on classical poetry, Eros the Bittersweet, with Pink Floyd on the turntable, would basically cover all the necessary territory.

Stoppard recently turned 70. It's been a long time - more than four decades - since the wordplay and irresistible intellectual conceit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead dazzled English critics. Since then he's written about the failures of ideology, the drama of the Cold War and the nexuses between art, science and politics in play after play - Travesties or Hapgood or The Real Inspector Hound or Squaring the Circle, to name a few. He could write about this stuff in his sleep; and, judging by the linguistic vitality of Rock'n'Roll, he probably did.

I have formed a theory that Stoppard is no longer a playwright, but a phenomenon (JK Rowling is another). There is nothing you can do about a phenomenon, since the responses to the phenomenon have very little to do with what said phenomenon actually writes.

If this play were written by Tom Smith, you can be pretty sure that nobody would have noticed it. But because it’s by Tom Stoppard, it is automatically “witty” and “intellectual”, whether this is borne out in the script or not. We can laugh while chewing on the roughage of, say, Sapphic scansion in the Latin poetry of Catullus, and feel perhaps a teeny bit intimidated and maybe, too, a teeny bit superior.

It makes us feel that culture is good for us: we're learning something. And that saves us from the existential doubt that might otherwise erupt from art's joyous and revolutionary purposelessness. If the medium is the message, then Rock'n'Roll has it all backwards. This isn't a play about rock'n'roll anarchy and erotic passion. No, it's where Apollo KO's Dionysius with a text book, and then he pinches his t-shirt.

As I left the Playhouse, I had a brief conversation with a nice man who had obviously enjoyed himself. He became a little annoyed when I said that I had been mostly bored. He said that Rock'n'Roll was entertainment, and couldn't be held to the standards of serious art (and that, basically, I was being a snob; only he was too polite to say so). But I don't think it's as easy as that. A huge element of the dazzle that surrounds Stoppard is the illusion that he makes a "theatre of ideas"; that in fact, this isn't mere "entertainment", but a worthy kind of art. It's art as social artefact, as intellectual trinket, for an economy that values information over wisdom.

Me, I'm unable to tell where art finishes and entertainment begins. I find Pirates of the Caribbean or Chicago entertaining, but I think Waiting for Godot is entertaining as well. On the one hand, I don't think Rock'n'Roll is entertainment; but on the other, I don't think that it's art, either. It's something else. I'm not sure quite what it is, but I suspect it's some kind of mass hallucination. The real question is whether it is, as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy said of Planet Earth, mostly harmless. Or not.