Swept up by Stoppard’s Viennese whirl
SHAKESPEARE in Love writer Tom Stoppard is best known for his fizzing wit, but his new play is a far more sombre affair. It’s a semiautobiographical tale charting the life of an extended Jewish family in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district.
It runs from the quarter’s heyday as a cultural melting pot in the early 1900s, through to the annexation of Austria in 1938, and the Holocaust that saw two-thirds of its Jewish population flee before the rest were deported to Nazi death camps.
There’s little we don’t, or shouldn’t, already know in Stoppard’s account of the period. However, the value lies not in its novelty but in its standing as a memorial to the dead, and a reconstruction of their dignity.
The stand-out characters are Adrian Scarborough as the businessman who marries Catholic beauty Greta (Faye Castelow), who is having an affair with Fritz, a devilishly dashing officer in the Austrian army (Luke Thallon).
Covering 55 years in two and a half hours can be bewildering. But the myriad character sketches create a vivid, epic sweep. They include Caroline Gruber as the grand matriarch and keeper of traditions, Emilia; and Tom’s son Ed Stoppard, as brilliant mathematician Ludwig.
Thanks to the author’s love of complex ideas, we are also treated to digressions on the geometry of cat’s cradles, and debates about the politics of a Jewish homeland versus the joys of cultural assimilation.
Yes, the characters can feel like mouthpieces, but Scarborough as warm patriarch Hermann weaves together oration, exposition and emotion to create a canny, gentle and stoical old man. And there is plenty of humour — gags fly like champagne corks at a bar mitzvah. The best of these is when a Doctor of Law drops in during a circumcision and asks for a cigar cutter, before adding, ‘Or I could use my teeth?’
The only shame, on the evening I saw it, was the laughter that greeted the Tom Stoppard character, Leo, when he spoke of his pride at being British. Metropolitan sceptics should remember the Brits were the first to take arms against Hitler, and the architects of the Kindertransport that saved 10,000 children.
Although the Holocaust casts a long shadow over it, Patrick Marber’s production teems with life and, indeed, children. It turns out to be surprisingly joyful, and rests on the love of the characters.
The ending fairly takes the wind out of you as the fate of those characters is recalled in 1955. But it’s Stoppard’s fondness for the living and the dead that abides.
Leopoldstadt (Wyndham’s Theatre)
Verdict: Poignant Holocaust memorial ★★★★✩