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.