Personal meets the political in Tom Stoppard’s harrowing family drama

My Stoppard journey began more than 40 years ago with the heady cocktail of verbal fireworks, erudition and wit that is his 1966 play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Now it seems it is to end, with what the great playwright suggests is his last play, as he navigates his own Jewish journey in Leopoldstadt.

Although his family were Czech Jews from Zlin, they were not practising and his mother was reluctant to discuss her roots. As Stoppard says in a frank and emotional programme essay, "Hitler made her Jewish" and it was only recently that he investigated how Tomas Straussler, his birth name, became Tom Stoppard.

Over the years I’ve often quoted Guildenstern’s plea, "Consistency is all I ask". So is Leopoldstadt consistent with Stoppard’s track record? The dialogue still crackles with wit, but the drama offers a different sensibility to his previous work, following the fortunes of one Viennese Jewish family through the first half of the 20th century. They navigate endemic antisemitism, then the rise of Nazism to its devastating conclusion. With the canvas this wide, flashes of fun are necessarily selective.

This though is fine storytelling: the many family members deftly conjured over five scenes, each in a different year between 1899 and 1955, the action almost all set in the same family drawing room. We watch infants grow into adolescents and then adults, young couples grow old, lose partners and too many disappear into the maw of the camps. Although this is well-trodden territory for many in the audience, it is still revelatory, for the power of the personal is preeminent when Stoppard is the storyteller.

Under the elegant, sensitive direction of Stoppard’s collaborator Patrick Marber, a uniformly excellent cast of 30 inhabit their roles and create the ups and downs of family life, embodying what it was like to live as assimilated Jews, marry in or out, conduct business and discuss the politics of the day.

The map of old Vienna that greets the audience lifts to reveal one of the great coups de theatre of this production: an elegant fin-de-siècle living room. It is entirely decorated and lit in shades of sepia, also worn by the family and their guests, who are momentarily formally grouped as for a photograph at this celebration of Christmas 1899 in the prosperous Merz family.

In the scene that follows, the Merzes and their guests give absorbing little insights into their lives. The pitfalls of assimilation are nicely illustrated by young Jacob proudly topping the lavishly decorated Christmas tree with a Magen David (Star of David). It’s his (gentile) mother Gretl (Faye Castelow, wittily beguiling) who tactfully suggests, "It’s a beautiful star darling, but it’s not the star we put at the top of our Christmas tree”. Grandma Emilia (Caroline Gruber, warmly authoritative) remarks, “Poor boy, baptised and circumcised in the same week, what can you expect?” Gretl responds, “It’s true. He yelled both times.”

This snappy dialogue balances longer speeches from paterfamilias Hermann and his brother-in-law Ludwig Jakobovicz, exchanging views on acculturation against the troubled background of centuries of Jewish life in a largely antisemitic Europe.

Hermann celebrates the progress “in one lifetime” from confinement in the Jewish quarter Leopoldstadt, forced to wear a yellow patch, to what he sees as acceptance. Ludwig counters with a reality check, “Assimilation means to carry on being a Jew without insult… I’m an unbeliever. I don’t observe Jewish customs except as a souvenir of family times, but to a gentile I’m a Jew”. Adrian Scarborough as Hermann and Ed Stoppard (son of Tom) as Ludwig are perfectly cast to knit together the first 40 years of this epic.

Meanwhile, matriarch Grandma leafs through family photograph albums introducing another poignant motif: images that remain. The fate of Gretl’s portrait, newly painted by Klimt, will become another.

Wives, sisters and daughters play pivotal roles too. An illicit affair with an officer has far reaching consequences. At a Passover Seder, it is Grandma rather than her converted son Hermann who officiates and answers the four questions asked by young (gentile) Pauli.

By 1924, a post-war generation has grown up fast. Ludwig’s nieces Hermine (Yasmin Paige) and forthright New Yorker Rosa (Jenna Augen), may embody jazz-age freedoms, smoking, drinking and sporting shorter skirts but, at the family gathering for the circumcision of baby Nathan, Ludwig’s great nephew, they still argue about assimilation, antisemitism and now the birth of German nationalism.

On the eve of Kriststallnacht in November 1938, the straitened circumstances of the family thanks to Nazi race laws are no more surprising than the loud knocking at the door and the vicious contempt of the ‘civilian’ overseeing the requisition of Jewish property. Yet there is still room for intellectual prowess. Playing cat’s cradle with knotted string, Ludwig initiates grandson Leo and great-nephew Nathan into the mathematics behind the unchanging relationships of the knots wherever they appear. As a metaphor for family in the violent upheavals and losses of war and the Holocaust, it cleverly presages the revelations and resolutions of the final scene. For in 1955 Nathan (Sebastian Armesto), the Anglicised Leo – now called Leonard Chamberlain (Luke Thallon) – and Aunt Rosa are reunited in the apartment and Stoppard’s play becomes its most autobiographical.

The journey is long, but never less than captivating. Leopoldstadt demands to be seen and not just by Stoppardian completists.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Marc Brenner

Leopoldstadt runs until Saturday 13 June. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Thu from 20 Feb & Sat only). Wyndham's Theatre, WC2H 0DA. https://leopoldstadtplay.com

Read more about the show, including an interview with Patrick Marber, in the Oct 2019 issue of JR.