Tom Stoppard, 82, has been saying that the just-opened Leopoldstadt is his last play. If so—and multitudes will hope it isn’t so—he’s winding down his career not with a whimper but with a display of dark fireworks. Stoppard partisans will now debate for likely some time to come whether this is his best play.
It’s definitely in the running. (This reviewer may still plug for Arcadia.) Whether it’s his most personal play is no contest: It claims that title. Forget about The Real Thing (1982) with its playwright protagonist. Of the lively comedy-romance one informed commentator said, “You do sense that this fascinating but elusive play could be filed under A for autobiographical.”
Leopoldstadt can now be considered in a significantly wider context concerning a truth Stoppard only discovered in recent years: his being a Jew born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia of two Jewish parents who raised him as Tomas Strassler. He was Tomas Strassler until his father was killed, his mother moved him and his brother Peter to England where she married military major Kenneth Stoppard and quite deliberately chose never again to discuss the immigrant family’s background.
Only when in recent years he encountered a cousin who had many of those details did he realize who he was, who he had been. Only then did he understand what had been kept from him and how the knowledge illuminated a plangent aspect of his early life. The cousin’s metaphorical punch in his severely Anglified solar plexus has served as an urgent inspiration, an inspiration prompting one of the globe’s most astonishing playwrights to deal no holds barred with the totality of his past.
Rather than dramatize the Strasslers outright, he’s done what playwrights and novelists do: fictionalize. He’s created two Viennese families called Merz and Jakobovicz. He’s looked closely at them in the years 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938, and 1955. He’s come up with four generations of Merz and Jakobovicz parents and children. (Yes, Stoppard has a history with history plays. Look at The Coast of Utopia, which examines shifting Russian politics and philosophy from 1833-66.)
For a review of a stage saga that could extend to a doorstop-sized novel length but won’t—Leopoldstadt exegeses are lurking, for sure—Stoppard follows the figures as they intertwine through both world wars and their aftermaths. His primary interest is their place as Jews—as Austrian Jews integrated into elegant late 19th century Viennese culture.
He depicts them in 1899 divided into two quarreling factions, one believing they had been fully accepted in Viennese society, the other not believing their complete assimilation for a minute. The introductory scene, full of smart, often contentious banter of the sort Stoppard is a master at unfolds at a Christmas tree trimming where one of the many children who abound throughout the work jokingly places a Jewish star on the top of the tree, an instant symbol of the clash between Viennese Catholics and Viennese Jews.
Stoppard then spends time in the twenties, when the shadow of the future was only detected by some Merz-Jakobovicz family members. Others remained content. He skips to a day in 1938 when gunshots outside the room where the families have met, are assuring themselves as much as they can that they will remain safe in the gathering storm. They’re disabused of the notion by the arrival of Nazi officials. N.B., The specific date is November 9, Kristallnacht. (Sound designer Adam Cork, who also supplies the threatening original music, makes certain the ominous glass-shattering of that day registers.)
The final scene in 1955 brings together three of the Merz-Jakobovicz descendants. Two of them represent family members who recall the past too well. The third, pointedly enough, is Stoppard’s version of himself, a thoroughly Anglicized writer now named Leo Chamberlain (Luke Thallon) who’s written a pair of comedy books that have caught on. Leo has smugly come to hold little interest in his origins. He abruptly changes his mind, though, when told how he had acquired a scar on his left hand, an incident Stoppard the playwright knows of as the real thing.
The characters populating Leopoldstadt are—to a man, woman and child—charged with life, though too numerous to describe in toto. Chief among them is Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough), the visionary owner of a successful factory the Nazi regime appropriates. Ludwig Jakobovicz (Ed Stoppard) is a mathematician who regards the children’s game Cat’s Cradle as a fascinating mathematical problem. This, of course, is another potent symbol. Ludwig is also intent on solving that mathematician’s head scratcher, the Riemann Hypothesis. (Remember that the solving of Fermat’s Theorem is frequently discussed in Arcadia.)
Hermann’s non-Jewish wife Gretl (Faye Castel) dallies with disdainful officer, Fritz (Thallon again), a dalliance that has heavy repercussions. There’s Rosa, a child in 1899 and by 1924 a flapper (Jenny Augen) intent on emigrating to New York. She is eventually one of the two cousins bringing Leo to his complete senses. The other is Nathan Fishbein (Sebastian Armesto). His knowledge of the Merz-Jacobovicz past has an especially impressive impact on Leo’s awakening. Caroline Gruber as matriarch Grandma Emilia, who’s only seen in the expansive 1899 sequence, lends weight to the myriad ensuing events.
But those are only some of the figures who enliven Leopoldstadt under Patrick Marber’s thrilling direction. To enhance every moment in the production, Marber has obtained strong contributions from set designer Richard Hudson and costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel, both of whom rose to their period-shifting challenges. Neil Austin’s subtle lighting is also important.
Successful as Leopoldstadt is—incidentally, Leopoldstadt refers to a Vienna district where Jews less wealthy than the Merz-Jakobovicz clans lived—the three-hour drama is not without its flaws. Particularly in the first scenes, dialog can seem expository, i.e., coming from a need to fill in the long, anfractuous story of the wandering Jews. Occasionally, the characters challenge each other on their perspectives, as they would have done, and yet a sense of debate for debate’s sake hovers. This is true, despite its cogency, of a quarrel Hermann and Ludwig have during the 1899 section.
Never mind. Stoppard—the once Tomas Strassler—has written Leopoldstadt at a time when anti-Semitism is again on the rise. He’s composed it at a time when the last Holocaust survivors remain to offer witness. (Might he even think of his final creation as rising from Jewish guilt?) But, most pertinently with his memory play, he’s contributed to absolutely necessary Holocaust literature. That’s no small achievement.
Leopoldstadt opened February 12, 2020, at Wyndham’s Theatre (London) and runs through June 13. Tickets and information: leopoldstatplay.com
