Leopoldstadt

by Tom Stoppard

seen at Wyndham's Theatre on 16 September 2021

Patrick Marber directs a large cast (twenty-five adults and several children) in Tom Stoppard's new play concerning the fate of two extended Jewish families in Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century. There ae major scenes in 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938 and 1955, and four generations of the Merz and Jakobovicz families are on stage at various times.

At the turn of the century the families are well off and slightly contemptuous of their humbler beginnings and any reminders of more traditional Jews from the easern provinces of the empire (they don't actualy live in Leopoldstadt which was by then a popular Jewish enclave in Vienna: one senses they find it beneath their dignity). Hermann in particular sees great possibilities in joining the bourgeois establishment, apparently prepared to overlook the snide anti-semitism surrounding him until it is too glaring even for him. Later, of course, in 1938, as the Nazis take over Austria, any such accommodation is impossible, and in the coda to the play the fate of almost all the family members is intoned in a bleak account of their deaths.

Stoppard's own experience of fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1938 as an infant and eventually being brought up as an English schoolboy with his stepfather's surname willingly adopted and for many years unaware of his wider family's story is represented in the play by a young man similarly naive in 1955, but this is determinedly not a play specifically about the Straussler family. Unfortunately all too many experienced similar aspirations of integration followed by brutal tragedy, and it is perhaps more salutary that Stoppard chose to portray a fictional exemplum of the fate of so many, rather than a documentary drama of an historical case. 

By shifting the location from his own family's provinical Bohemia to the imagined families' cosmopolitan Vienna, and evoking a wide ranging cast of businessmen, doctors and professors, matriarchs and young women eager for more than domesticity, all enmeshed in a comfortable and sociable setting, he easily blends sharp reminders of prejudice with dazzling explorations of intellectual pursuits (especially mathematics) and also with socal comedy and Jewish humour - the scenes in 1924 revolve around an almost farcical conflict between various family members over whether the new-born male should be circumcised, with a typical Stoppardian riff on mistaken identity when a visiting business associate is mistaken for the surgeon invited to perform the rite.

The families could be seen as turning a blind eye to danger for too long - but who did not? The collapse of security in 1938 is a chilling interruption to 'normal' life. After scenes of domestic tension amidst family solidarity, almost the stuff of any comfortable family-oriented drama, the arrival of thugs self-appointed as official bureaucrats to dispossess the family of their apartment, all the while spouting vile terms of abuse, is sickening. The fact that very little overt physical violence is needed renders the ultimate peril all the more frightening.

Marshalling a large cast and exploring a multi-generational story is a huge challenge for playwright, director and actors alike. Stoppard's decades of experience with paradox, coincidence and wit here enable him to create memorable vignettes which underpin a rich milieu: we may wish we had time to explore some of these in more detail, but we have to be satisfied with just the small hints we are given. Yet it is one of these apparently incidental scenes in 1938 which triggers the poignant connection in 1955 between the young Englishman and the embittered Austrian survivor when hitherto their utterly different experiences threatened to leave them cold to each other: a quiet and subtle masterstroke in a play of panoramic ambition.

Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act

by Athol Fugard

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 9 September 2021

Diane Page, this year's winner of the JMK Award for new directors, directs Athol Fugard's play from 1972 concerning an affair between a librarian Frieda Joubert (Scarlett Brookes) and a schoolteacher Errol Philander (Shaq Taylor) which falls foul of race relations legislation in apartheid South Africa because she is white and he is not.

The affair is of necessity clandestine, both because of the colour bar and because Errol has a wife and children. Consequently there are any number of tensions between the two, whose needs and passions conflict with fear, uncertainty and suspicion. As Errol and Frieda circle round a huge sunken pit in the centre of the stage, and only occasionally meet in it, they voice their anxieties; each tries to hold on to the joy of their relationship as it threatens to crumble under pressure. The whole stage floor is a matt black, and the circular pit has no sharp edges: the ground just slopes into the wall of the pit, making their circling round it look perilously like water swirlng round a drain. The pit is, of course, of no use as a hiding place when a police raid led by Detective Sergeant J du Prez (Richard Sutton) leads to their arrest and interrogation. Niall McKeever's set achieves both a sense of limbo and an underlying threat.

This is not a play in which love triumphs over adversity. The two lovers are brim full of insecurities deriving from their personalities as much as their political and social situations. Lyrical outbursts vie with the pain arising from the need for concealment, and though this need is obvious it also leads to feelings of guilt and inadequacy. The wider issues of desperate poverty in the townships and intense bigotry in the privileged white areas create plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding. In a mere seventy minutes a whole crushing environment is evoked through conversation, monologue, and the chilling impersonality of the official police report which is delivered with startling venom.

Scarlett Brookes and Shaq Taylor portray two people involved with one another yet always beset by wariness of their predicament and even mutual suspicion. Though neither disavows their relationship under pressure, there is little sense that it could ever survive the rigour of public exposure. It is a salutary reminder that more is at play in the world than struggles for personal fulfilment, and that social oppression can be frighteningly strong. 

This particular piece must be grounded in its historical context to make sense, and therefore the cast adopted fairly strong South African accents. Occasionally this made it hard to catch everything that was said, even in the intimate context of the Orange Tree, and it perhaps ran the risk of giving the audience the consolation of thinking 'that was then, that was there'. Unfortunately for many it is no consolation at all. The cruelties of South African apartheid may have disappeared, but racial prejudice and oppression are still rife; the play has not lost its force or relevance.

Bach & Sons

by Nina Raine

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 1 September 2021

Nicholas Hytner directs Simon Russell Beale as Johann Sebastian Bach with Pandora Colin as his first wife Maria Barbara, Racheal Ofori as his second wife Anna Magdalena, Ruth Lass as Maria's sister Katerina, Douggie McMeekin as Wilhelm Friedrich, Samuel Blenkin as Carl Philip Emanuel, one of four boys as Johann Gottfried Bernhard, and Pravessh Rana as Frederick the Great of Prussia in a new play by Nina Raine. 

The Bridge Theatre has been configured as a thrust stage for this production, with a set designed by Vicki Mortimer inluding moveable truckles to bring on and remove various rooms (offices, bedrooms, court salons), and dominated by a cascade of inverted harpsichords suspended above the acting area. All this emphasises the supreme importance of music in the Bach household, and it is hardly surprising that the play concentrates on the dynamics of a family springing from noted musicians in the past, with a genius father hoping to instil musicianship in his sons for the future.

Inevitably there are tensions, with the two elder brothers vying for their father's approval, and suffering from his implacable honesty, which leads him to criticise their attempts at composition ruthlessly.,He sees it as teaching without fear or favour, whereas the boys find it an intolerable strain. In the background Gottfried the youngest is already showing precocious signs of talent, while their mother frets at her husband's intransigence and tries to suppress feelings of jealousy as a young soprano enters the orbit of the family, and her sister Katerina devotedly keeps house. 

Despite the exuberance of young boys both revelling in and fearing their father's attention, and the delight they take in groaning at oft-repeated family anecdotes (the long walk their father took to visit Buxtehude, for example) or hearing a new example of his cussedness with authority, there is an underlying melancholy in the household, since illness and mortality are not far away and several siblings have already died in infancy. The first half of the play concludes with the poignant death of their mother, the boys' anguish that their father was away on business throughout her protracted illness, and their incredulity that within barely a year he announces to them his plan to marry Anna Magdalena.

In the second half the boys have grown up, Wilhelm seeking to avoid the burden of his father's expectations through drink, Carl closed in by the pain of always feeling second best even as he makes a career for himself in the creepy atmosphere of the Prussian court, and Gottfried studying elsewhere to be a lawyer. In Leipzig Bach continues his irascible interactions with bureaucrats and is scornfully impatient with the quality of the musicians and singers who perform - or misperform - his work, while Anna Magdalena has her own catalogue of sorrows with numerous infants now buried. When J S Bach visits the Prussian court, the meeting with Frederick the Great is stilted and difficult, made somehow more uneasy by Frederick's willingness to foment the strain he perceives between father and son.

It is always a pleasure to see Simon Russell Beale portray a character of intelligence and passion. He manages to convey some of the intricacies of compositional technique with complete conviction so that they seem almost straightforward, while also showing us a man whose self-confidence and prickliness hide the scars of a difficult childhood and the sheer slog of making music to order while believing it to be of supreme importance. 

However, the play does have problems. There is always a difficulty in making drama about acknowledged genius, especially when exposition is needed to set the scene. Famously Peter Shaffer's Amadeus resolved this by using Salieri as a hugely biassed narrator to explicate Mozart's life. In Bach & Sons the composer's career, and the tensions in his family life, are presented without a filter of this sort, and so all the informaton we need to make sense of the situation has to proceed through dialogue. Unfortunately this tends to dissipate the dramatic tension.

Furthermore the time frames are imprecise, and in the interests of dramatic compression they are in fact seriously misleading. I had difficulty in the opening scenes in determining how old the two older boys were meant to be. We were told that Gottfried (the youngest) is three and is kept awake by his father relentlessly trying out musical ideas on the harpsichord, so when he appears later as a young boy at times carried around by his older brothers we may assume some time has passed and he is perhaps by then five. As the actors are young men, I assumed they were playing teenagers, and I kept provisionally lowering their ages in my mind as the style of their conversation (with plenty of references to 'Mummy') indicated their youth. On the other hand in a crucial scene before their mother becomes ill, Carl accuses Wilhelm of having alcohol on his breath (in adult life he did drink), which most easily implies mid adolescence at the earliest. In fact, Wilhelm was ten, Carl six and Gottfried five when their mother died. Also, their aunt died nine years later, but in the play she is portrayed as welcoming Carl to the family home in Leipzig at the time of his father's death sme twenty years later. The creepily camp Frederick of Prussia appears to be giving Bach the first news of Gottfried's untimely death in the guise of offering condolences, but their meeting took place in 1747 and Gottfried died in 1739.

Dramatic licence is of course just that, and one hardly registers the historical distortions that are rife in Shakespeare's plays, but the curious mixture of careful and wilful chronology exhibited here is at times distracting. The various themes of the play - the potentially toxic experience of having a genius for a father and teacher combined; the crushing blows of multiple pregnancies followed too soon by child burials; the enigma of a composer of sublime music who is a difficult man to live with - jostle for attention but do not enttirely cohere to make a great play.