Stoppard’s new play ‘elegiac’ and ‘brilliant’? Pull the other one
TArcadia Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the great living British playwrights. Getting to see a new Tom Stoppard play is therefore normally something to relish.
Given my own family history, I was particularly excited at the prospect of Leopoldstadt, his new play about Viennese Jews before and after the Nazis. I saw it with my cousin who, like me, is descended from people similar to those depicted in the play – prosperous, charitable, and culturally sophisticated urban German Jews.
But as soon as the curtain went up, we began to shift uneasily, exchange rampant side-eye glances and smirk in disbelief. The action consists of snapshots of a family declaiming on key facets of Jewish life in 20th century Europe. They are shown as rich and optimistic in a 1899 tableaux, politicised in the Twenties, and beleaguered and persecuted in 1938. The concluding scene sees three survivors – including a character based on Stoppard himself – regrouping in the old Vienna flat in the Fifites.
The play was little more than a sentimental barrage of clichés and didactic dialogue. Its purpose, it seemed, was not to offer up a fresh and interesting take on one of the great tragedies of the last century, but to artlessly explain to an audience such things as what Jews do on Passover, the pros and cons of Zionism, how cultured Viennese Jews were and how nasty the Nazis were. My cousin and I felt rather like
we were in a Hebrew school lesson, or in a poorly curated Holocaust museum in a provincial American city.
Worse, it made us feel deeply uncomfortable, because in its effort to be sympathetic and
– as breathless critics insisted – “moving”, the play ended up caricaturing Jews – our modes of speech, passions, humour.
The appalling mixture of sentimentality and obviousness made us wonder if the story of 20th century European Jewry is so novel that it requires this kind of school-level treatment.
Certainly, the critics seemed to think so: we watched with bewilderment as the reviews rolled in – “elegiac epic”, “masterwork”, “a brilliant, unrevivable undertaking”.
Of course, Leopoldstadt emerged from Sir Tom’s own relatively recent discovery of the extent of his Jewish roots.
He should have explored this with his therapist – and spared us the drama.