Tom Stoppard’s last play?
Our verdict
Theatre
Leopoldstadt
Wyndham’s Theatre
★★★★★
So here it is. Tom Stoppard’s last play. Very possibly. Britain’s greatest living dramatist has said that
Leopoldstadt is likely to be the end of the road – given his age (82) and how long it takes him to write. Almost every major work he has produced since he burst on to the scene with his Hamlet spin-off Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966 has been met with high anticipation.
That this is probably his swansong makes attendance near compulsory.
And, watching Stoppard’s accomplished family drama – which covers more than 50 years and distils the experience of Middle-european Jewry in the 20th century, a history he’s bound up in – I can’t think of a more apposite and moving way for him to conclude his career. Is it the equal, say, of Arcadia (1993), which felt like it expanded the limits of what it was possible for a play to contain, entwining two periods and combining questions about thermodynamics, determinism, romanticism, landscape gardening, and so on? I’d say not.
Yet whereas his last play, 2015’s The Hard Problem (about neuroscience, consciousness and, again, determinism) sounded too much from the head, Leopoldstadt – without dispensing with his customary cleverness – is from the heart. It’s straightforward, direct, honest – cumulatively impressive and renewing your appreciation for what he has done before.
In tracing the fortunes of two fictional Viennese families – Merz and Jakobovicz – connected by marriage, decimated by the nightmare of Nazism in the wake of the 1938 Anschluss, the evening moves into ever darker terrain. There are absences where once there were people, dead ends instead of promising futures. We know, of course, how many millions got caught up in the tragedy; Stoppard gives that incalculable human catastrophe a domestic dimension and brings it home in more ways than one.
Here, for the first time on stage, the man born Tomáš Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937, broaches his Jewish ancestry and identity, one submerged after his family’s flight from the Nazis, and his widowed mother’s subsequent marrying of the Englishman who gave him his surname. This is a play about attempted assimilation, and the profound cost of that.
The district of Leopoldstadt was the Jewish quarter of Vienna prior to the emancipation of the mid-1860s. First seen in 1899, the central character Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough), a successful manufacturer, has raised his family elsewhere, off the Ringstrasse. He has married a gentile (Faye Castelow’s Gretl), converting to Catholicism. Living the bourgeois dream, he says he has arrived at the “promised land”. He worships culture, shrugs off the scepticism of Ludwig, his mathematician brother-in-law (Stoppard’s son Ed, sporting a dashingly cerebral demeanour), who warns: “A Jew can be a great composer. He can be the toast of the town. But he can’t not be a Jew. In the end, if it doesn’t catch up on him, it will catch up on his children.”
An early image – Hermann’s son Jacob affixing a star of David atop a Christmas tree – points up the underlying tensions. And as the evening jumps forward, one year, then to 1927, then 1938 (and Kristallnacht), revisiting the same house through the years, we track his disillusion and despair, Scarborough conveying the collapse of confidence, shrinking before us. In the first half the dialogue needs more room to breathe, the many characters more space to expand. Yet director Patrick Marber holds you, creating a living tableaux which gives shape to the welter of relations.
After an overwrought first act, Stoppard brings everything to an unforgettable, theatrical climax in the second half. Luke Thallon, brittle and thoroughly British, is Leo, Hermann’s great nephew, but also a veiled version of the author, trying circa 1955 (as Stoppard did, later) to find out what became of his family. This youth who was rescued and raised in the UK changed his name from Leopold to Leonard and he weeps when confronted by the loss that entails. The author has said he cried watching these scenes, and I’m not surprised.
People have sometimes accused him of being too clever by half, lacking the power to move us beyond words. Here is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
‘It’s straightforward, direct, honest – renewing your appreciation for what he has done before’
Until June 13; tickets: 0844 482 5151; leopoldstadtplay.com