Oxford Theatre Guild break new ground next week when they perform for the first time at Oxford’s newest theatre. They stage Tom Stoppard’s Travesties from Tuesday in the Simpkins Lee Theatre at Lady Margaret Hall.

Travesties is a laugh-out-loud high-speed romp, turning historical events on their head in the search for truth about the nature of art.

Stoppard based the play on historical facts. During the First World War, novelist James Joyce, political revolutionary Lenin and artist Tristan Tzara all lived in Zurich.

Joyce was writing his ground-breaking novel Ulysses, Lenin was plotting to return to Russia to foment revolution, and Tzara was promoting his bizarre ‘anti-art’ movement Dada.

Joyce persuaded a minor British consular official called Henry Carr to play Algernon in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, with the remarkable outcome that Carr sued Joyce for the cost of a pair of trousers he bought for the production and Joyce counter-sued for slander!

From these factual ingredients, Stoppard concocts a fantasy involving literary and theatrical pastiche, limerick verse, vaudeville song, and heated debate on the role of the artist and the revolutionary — all conveyed with characteristically dazzling wit and wordplay.

Director Collin Macnee calls the play “a multi-layered knickerbocker glory of a comic confection”.

OTG is no stranger to trying out new venues. This large amateur theatre group has no permanent home and mixes up performances at the Oxford Playhouse and Trinity College gardens with less familiar venues.

The Simpkins Lee Theatre is a fully equipped and accessible modern theatre but with an interior décor which refers to the 18th century, making it a perfect foil for the ‘Britains abroad’ setting of Travesties.