STOPPARD’S POIGNANT SWANSONG
Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2 (0844-482 5151). Until 13 June Running time: 2hrs 35mins ★★★★
Tom Stoppard has said that
Leopoldstadt is likely to be his final play, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. If so, I cannot think of a more “apposite and moving way” for Britain’s “greatest living dramatist” to sign off than with this epic yet intimate family drama. Stoppard, 82, was born Tomáš Straüssler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1937, but his own Jewish identity was submerged after his family’s flight from the Nazis, and his widowed mother’s remarriage. With Leopoldstadt, which ranges over 50 years from Vienna in 1899 to the aftermath of the Holocaust, Stoppard addresses his Jewish heritage on stage for the first time. And if the play isn’t among his very finest, it is still a profoundly moving drama about family, identity, and the costs of assimilation.
The focus of this “late masterwork” is the Merz family, said Nick Curtis in the London Evening Standard. In 1899, they are businessmen, lecturers and doctors who marry out, celebrate Christmas, and are convinced that assimilation and social advancement are in reach for Jews formerly confined to the Leopoldstadt quarter of Vienna. As we revisit them in 1924, then just before Kristallnacht in 1938, and then in a 1955 coda, we see how tragically they were mistaken. The play is by turns “wise, witty and devastatingly sad” – and Patrick Marber’s “warm, emotionally nimble production draws us into what could be a daunting sprawl of characters and events”.
I remained daunted, said David Benedict in Variety. For much of the play, most of the characters are more “expository mouthpieces for ideas rather than fully fledged characters” – and it’s hard to follow who’s who. Only the tighter postwar scene truly blazes with Stoppard’s brilliance. At times, the sprawling cast of characters and interlocking relationships can be “baffling”, agreed Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage. “Yet I think that is part of Stoppard’s point” about how quickly we forget even recent generations. The “aching centre of this play, its great plea, is that it is important to try to remember and to understand”. It left me profoundly moved.