Review: Leopoldstadt

Tom Stoppard is regarded by some as the greatest living English playwright. Ironically, like Joseph Conrad, English wasn’t his first language. He was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, but left in 1939 at the age of 2 as the Nazis were invading, first to Singapore, then India. He became known as Tom Stoppard when his mother married Kenneth Stoppard and moved to England in 1946. After an early stint as a journalist, his career as a playwright took off in the mid 1960’s with the international hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Now 85, the man known for his thorny, intellectual plays, like Travesties, Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia has written what is undoubtedly his most personal, Leopoldstadt, as he contemplates his Jewish heritage.

Just because it’s autobiographical doesn’t mean Leopoldstadt is an intimate chamber piece. It has a cast of 38 and spans 56 years in time. Set in Vienna, it opens in 1899 with a family gathering, not in the Jewish quarter Leopoldstadt, but in the sumptuous apartment of a wealthy business owner, Hermann Merz, in the Ringstrasse. Though raised a Jew, Hermann has married a gentile, Gretl, and converted to Catholicism, so the family is celebrating the holidays with a Christmas. tree  As several generations bustle about, discussions ensue, in typical Stoppard fashion, between relatives about weighty topics, like the work of the Zionist Theodor Herzl and the possibility of a Jewish homeland.

The play follows with four more scenes (presented without intermission), tracking the family history and the fate of Austrian Jews. In 1900, there’s hope of progress and assimilation in a new century (but the caveat, “You can’t not be a Jew); in 1924, the rise of both Marxism and nationalism (the precursors of the Nazis); in 1938, while the family, some in denial, debates escape plans, the arrival of Nazis to requisition the apartment, seize their belongings, and be transported away; and finally, in 1955, the reunion of a young British citizen of Austrian descent (a stand-in for Stoppard) with two of his Austrian relatives who have survived. As the young Brit asks about members of the family tree, the answer, one after another, comes with the simple words: “death,” “Auschwitz,” or “Dachau.”

It’s a harrowing way to conclude. Like his stand-in, Stoppard has to process his survivor guilt and by extension is asking us to do the same. As the new Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, makes clear, there is plenty for Americans to be ashamed of in their treatment of Jews in the Nazi era, and even beyond.

Stoppard has to balance the history lesson with the complicated lives of his characters in Leopoldstadt. Sometimes their sheer numbers can make the plot confusing and the exposition didactic, but in the end the strength of the actors and the confident direction of Patrick Marber, himself a playwright (Closer) make for a play that is satisfyingly Stoppard-esque in its intellectual ambitions but also effective emotionally and also relevant to our politically polarized times.  Now playing a limited engagement at the Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th St.

 (Photo by Joan Marcus)