Leopoldstadt
by Tom Stoppard
Directed by Patrick Marber
Set designs by Richard Hudson
Music by Adam Cork
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
Saturday 8th February 2020, 14.30
Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Rod, London. I’ve rarely noticed it because we usually walk along that side of the road from Covent Garden or Trafalgar Square … today we got a bus right there, so got off opposite.
ADULT CAST
(The child cast is in triplicate, due to restrictions on children on stage, and I won’t list the child actors, just their characters)
1899
Caroline Gruber – Grandma Emilia
Adrian Scarborough- Hermann Merz, her son
Alexis Zegerman – Eva, her daughter
Faye Castelowe – Gretl, Hermanns wife. A Catholic.
Ed Stoppard – Ludwig, Eva’s husband. A mathematician
Clara Francis – Wilma, Ludwig’s sister
Aaron Neil- Ernst, Wilma’s husband, a doctor
Dorothea Myer-Bennett – Hanna, sister to Wilma & Ludwig
Illan Galkoff- Pauli, Ludwig & Eva’s son
Sadie Shimmin – Poli, cook & housekeeper
Felicity Davidson -Hilde, parlour maid
Natalie Law – Jana, nursemaid
plus:
Young Jacob, son of Hermann & Gretl
Young Sally, daughter of Ernst & Wilma
Young Rosa, her sister
1900 add …
Luke Thallon – Fritz, an Austrian officer
1924 the kids have grown up. Add …
Yasmin Paige – Hermine, daughter of Hanna and Kurt
Sebastian Armesto- Jacob, son of Hermann & Gretl
Eleanor Wyd – Nellie, daughter of Ludwig & Eva
Ayve Leventis – Sally, daughter of Ernst & wilma
Jenna Augen – Rosa, her sister
Griffin Stevens – Aaron, married to Nellie
Alexander Newland – Kurt, married to Hanna
Joe Coen – Zac, married to Sally
Noof McEwan – Otto, a banker
Jake Neads – Mohel (circumcision doctor)
1938 add …
Sam Hoare – Percy Chamberlain, an English journalist
Rhys Bailey – Young Nathan, son of Sally & Zac
Mark Edel-Hunt – Civilian (a Nazi official)
Joe Coen – Nazi policeman
Jake Neads – Nazi policeman
plus
Young Leo, son of Nellie and Aaron
Mimi, daughter of Sally & Zac
Bella, her sister
Heine, son of Hermine and Otto
1955
Sebastian Armesto- Nathan, son of Sally & Zac
Jenna Augen – Rosa – daughter of Ernst & Wilma (from 1924)
Luke Thallon – Leo, son of Nellie and Aaron
Forty-one actors performing if you include the alternative child members of the cast? We’re seeing the play in the third week of its run and there are still no reviews, although it has been described as Stoppard’s masterpiece in “What’s On” and “What To Look Out for in 2020” sections in the press. The official “opening” is 12 February. I wonder about these long delayed press nights especially as so many commentators seem to have seen it. I also ponder “Preview” periods where our cheaper seats in the back stalls at the side run to £65. To me if it’s full price, it’s not a preview. The Royal Shakespeare Company previews at reduced prices. But unusually no theatre bloggers had posted before 12 February, so I held it back.
Wyndham’s Theatre was where Patrick Marber directed Don Juan in Soho, oddly one of the most viewed reviews on this site in 2019. The size of the cast and the stature of the writer makes me wonder why it isn’t being performed in the National’s Olivier Theatre with a more appropriate stage size and especially audience size. I doubt that there are many writers who could have pitched this size of cast successfully.
Tom Stoppard has reached an age when he wants to consider his family past. I doubt that it’s autobiographical but there are resonances. A key speech comes in the first scene. Wilma is a sister-in-law of the central figure, Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough). She is trying to label a photo album. This resonated with me. My mother left two biscuit tins of photos. Some had a note on the back, most didn’t.
Wilma It’s still an amazing thing to me, to know the faces of the dead! I can remember Grandpa Jakobovicz’s tobacco-stained whiskers, but his wife died giving birth to Poppa before there were photographs, so now no one knows what she looked like any more than if she’d been some kind of rumour.… (later) … Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.
Leopoldstadt, Scene 1
Indeed. My grandmother died when my father was a year old. We have a funeral card, but no photograph. So, like many people as they get older, those who went before begin to fascinate me. That’s what he has imagined here. Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia, not Austria. The shift to Austria is obvious. While anti-Semitism was rife and viscious throughout Eastern Europe, it was institutionalized in its most horrific form in Germany and Austria. Austria got off very lightly on the post-war guilt area, simply because of the Cold War, and the allies need to bring Austria on board in 1955. In Victor Sebestyen’s 1946: The Making of The Post-War World he has this note:
In 1938 most Austrians had supported the Anschluss. From a population of seven million there were more than 700,000 Nazi Party members, and more than 1.2 million Austrians served in German military units of one kind or another. Austrians were disproportionately represented in the SS – and among the guards and officials who ran the concentration camps.
Victor Sebestyen: 1946
Hitler was born in Austria, studied in Vienna, and it’s said that he first acquired his virulent racism in Vienna. He didn’t move to Germany until 1913.
People seek out personal references. The one that jumps out here is the character of Leo in 1938 and 1955. In 1938, he’s “Young Leo” aged eight, traumatized when the Nazi official makes him pick up a broken cup and he’s cut and bleeding. He forgets this entirely. He was lucky. His mother is a widow. His father was killed when Austrian artillery shelled the apartment block full of Marxists in 1934. His mother is being courted by an English journalist who plans to marry her so as to get her out of Austria. Young Leopold moves to England with them where he becomes Leonard and grows up to be an Englishman with no memory of his Jewish past. We know that Tomáš Straussler was born in 1937, and escaped the day the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, and via Singapore, Australia and India eventually arrived in England. He became Thomas in India. His widowed mother married Major Stoppard in 1945, and he arrived in England as Tom Stoppard in 1946. He is now of course Sir Tom Stoppard. Don’t read too much into the parallel. Stoppard is a great fiction writer. Thats what you do, combine bits you know with imagination.
THE SETTING AND FORM
1899 The Merz family before Christmas
The play is set in Vienna. Leopoldstadt was the Jewish quarter of Vienna. It was estimated to have a population of 185,000 Jews in 1938. About two thirds emigrated and 66,500 were murdered by the Nazis. However, the play doesn’t take place in Leopoldstadt. The Merz family now live across the Danube in the wealthy Catholic area. Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough) owns a clothing factory, and is married to a Catholic, Gretl (Faye Castelowe). The Merz family are Jewish, and Hermann has been baptized as a Christian and wants to be assimilated into Viennese society. He remembers his grandfather wore a caftan, but that his father wore a top hat to the opera, and Galicia was the family origin (Galicia is now shared between Ukraine and Poland). So like the main Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire in the 19th century to the USA, Britain and indeed Germany, the family were presumably fleeing pogroms.
The play is structured in time periods, linked by projected photos and realia. We start in 1899 and 1900, with the wealthy family discussing assimilation versus prejudice. Hermann, the one who married out and got baptised gets to confront the depth of prejudice with Fritz, an Austrian officer (Luke Thallon). I’m not going to spoil the plot by saying why. It’s a brilliant scene. The interval comes here.
1924: Klimt portrait of Gretl on the wall
Then we move to 1924. I wouldn’t have known the significance unless I’d been reading Travellers in The Third Reich by Julia Boyd on the train from Poole to London. 1924 was when the victorious allies agreed to relax the Treaty of Versailles war reparations on both Germany and Austria, which signalled a short period of intense prosperity before the Great Depression of 1929.
1938. The “Civilian” – Nazi official (Mark Edel Hunt). They’ve removed the red swastika armband for the photo
Next up is 1938. Anschluss was the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. This is a few months later with the Kristallnacht pogrom. The Merz family are huddled together in the remaining apartment the family own … much of the house has been “Aryanized” or confiscated, and here they get to confront the Nazis, and are rounded up for transportation. One of the most powerful scenes in the play is when they hear the noise of Kristallnacht outside. We don’t need to see anything. It’s all in sound and reaction. The 1938 ending, centred on Ernst, the doctor (Aaron Neill) is most moving.
1955: two survivors, Leo (Luke Thallon) and Nathan (Sebastian Armesto)
In 1955, we see the three surviving members. The only three surviving members. The significance of the date is that it marks the end of the Allied four-nation occupation of Vienna, which like Berlin had been divided into four zones.
The sheer number of the cast is used effectively. It shows the vibrancy and busy nature of the Merz household in 1899 / 1900, then in 1925. In 1938, they’re all packed into the room in despair and terror, then 1955 has just three survivors on a suddenly very empty stage until the very end when all re-appear ghost like. That’s also why there is virtually no doubling up. Luke Thallon plays one of the only major roles that is doubled: Fritz, the Austrian officer in 1900 and the now English surviver Leo in 1955. Sebastian Armesto doubles Jacob, the son of Hermann injured in World War One then later Nathan, the survivor of the camps.
That huge crowd at the end is incredibly effective.
I’m going to discuss it in sections
ANTI-SEMITISM & JEWISHNESS
Tom Stoppard Significantly I never felt targeted in the arena of antisemitism. I felt like a bystander. I don’t recall a single occasion where I personally have felt that I was being attacked on the grounds of race. Obviously, if I’d lived a Jewish life from childhood there would have been many more opportunities for that to have happened. So it’s impossible to disentangle the psychology of it. But for whatever reason I didn’t feel individually implicated … There was actually a moment when I understood for the first time that my mother had sisters who were murdered, not to mention her parents and my father’s parents.
Interview by John Nathan, The Jewish Chronicle, 23 January 2020
A key symbol in the first scene is the Christmas Tree they are decorating. I know couples who are mixed Jewish and Gentile. They have Christmas trees. But if you go to see it, do note the star the kids put on top.
Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough)
Ludwig (Ed Stoppard) is Hermann’s brother-in-law, married to his sister, Eva. He has some key speeches, especially a long discussion with Hermann early on. Ludwig points out that he’s a non-believer, but that nevertheless he will always be regarded as a Jew. Basically, he’s saying “Don’t fool yourself.” A lot of my reading in the last year has touched on anti-semitism, it is after all in the news, and in both the books mentioned above most clearly, but also Robert Harris’s An Officer And A Spy based on the Dreyfus case in France.
I’ve stated this in other articles here, but my father was in the first British unit into Belsen. He had nightmares about it all his life and he died age 54 in 1966. There was no tolerance whatsoever of any hint of anti-Semitism for him. I also recall my sister’s boyfriend was told not to park his Volkswagen Beetle in our drive. My dad would list the involvement of Volkswagen and Mercedes in camp slave labour at the drop of a hat (and in 1966, interestingly BMW and Audi were not on the radar as significant companies!)
The play lists the wide spread of anti-Semitism in Eastern European countries. Add France. The only reason Spain comes lower is that Ferdinand and Isabella forced Jews and Moslems to either convert or emigrate when they conquered Granada in 1492. A Jewish friend at university used to note that at least Britain (by no means immune from the blight) had appointed Benjamin Disraeli as Prime Minister in the 19th Century. Yes, he had converted, but nevertheless his name made his ethnic origin clear. My politics tutor at Hull told me he chose Hull because that’s where Oswald Moseley’s fascists got attacked most strongly when they tried to march through the streets in the 1930s.
Leo growing up in Britain, had never felt Jewish, though as Nathan points out he is the only one left who had four Jewish grandparents. He explains that his mother never stressed it for fear of a Nazi invasion of Britain. That rings true. Apparently, the Nazis had compiled lists of Jews and Freemasons and Communists with invasion in mind. Remember Pastor Niemoller’s 1946 confession (which exists in several versions):
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The last scene of Leopoldstadt brought tears to my eyes. The family is assembled across the back of the stage, and at the front, Aunt Rosa (Jenna Augen), the American survivor, recites their fates slowly.
I believe Jeremy Corbyn and senior members of the Labour Party should sit and watch it and consider their past actions and their equally culpable inactions. Corbyn’s reaction to the anti-semitic mural by Kalen Ockerman in East London in 2012 was unforgivable. He had posted that he didn’t understand why it was being removed. Once he was caught out we got:
I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on, the contents of which are deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic
Jeremy Corbyn
The mural was a grotesque characterisation. Either Corbyn is anti-Semitic, tolerant of anti-Semites or stupid.
1900 … Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough) and Fritz, the Austrian officer (Luke Thallon). This is when Hermann realizes he is not accepted as a ‘Viennese gentleman.”
At times in the play, we thought the horror could have been more dramatic, and openly violent, but by the end, I realized Stoppard’s restraint was absolutely right. Much of the terror that the Nazi official induces is because the Merz family all KNOW. He doesn’t need to point a gun at them, or use overt physical force because his power is so absolute. (A powerful performance by Mark Edel-Hunt). Nathan (Sebastian Armesto), the third survivor sums up the holocaust so very briefly in the last scene, and we know how much more could have been said. I won’t quote him. Be there and get the impact.
In an interview, Tom Stoppard says he had problems with using Jewish terminology. He admits to having written Oy, vey! and being advised to cut it. I instantly thought of Max Bygraves years ago on TV explaining that where he grew up in East London, the Catholics and Jews were so mixed up that they used to sing Oy, Vey! Maria.
THE UNKINDEST CUT
One aspect of the play and one of the rare comedy parts is discussion of circumcision. In 1924, the baby (I think it’s Nathan) is about to be circumcised, and his mother is horrified, but they feel they have to please the grandmother … the only “strongly Jewish” one in religious terms. Grandma Emilia (Caroline Gruber) gets the only “Jewish Joke” lines throughout, and there are very few. Some of the circumcision plot was very funny (as were earlier references). Yes. it is a barbaric mutilation. One of life’s irony is that no one it’s been done to will ever recognize that fact. The practice spread well beyond the Jewish community in both Britain and the USA, a possible effect of the number of Jewish doctors who convinced themselves it was genuinely medically desirable rather than a religious rite. One of the ways that you can test (e.g. spies) for a 1950s British school education is to ask the meaning of ‘cavalier’ and ’roundhead.’
BRITISHNESS
I read this before I went. A journalist noted it (as an example of London audiences), and the same happened when we saw it. In 1955 Leo lists the things that make him proud to be British. Two of them ‘asylum for exiles and refugees’ and ‘the royal family’ brought laughter round the theatre. I’d think this was unintentional as Stoppard must have been writing before the Prince Andrew and Harry & Meghan stories dominated the papers.
VIENNA
1899 L to R: Ludwig (Ed Stoppard), Eva (Alexis Zegerman), Gretl (Faye Castelowe), Hermann (Adrian Scarborough)
Around 1900 – 1914 Vienna was one of the most exciting places to be. There’s a fair amount of name-checking. Freud gets in there as does Mahler … Hanna, Ludwig’s sister is a noted concert pianist. Brahms had died in 1897, but also gets name-checked.
Gretl has her portrait (Woman in a green shawl) painted by Gustav Klimt, its commissioning indicating Hermann’s wealth. (I would have preferred a racier version by Egon Schiele, but he was only ten years old at the time.) That’s an interesting aside because Rosa is trying to recover the painting in 1955 – it’s being exhibited at the Belvedere museum in Vienna They say that there are works by Klimt and Schiele hidden away in the vaults of Viennese Art Museums – they daren’t exhibit them for fear of the descendants of those who owned them before the Nazis looted them, coming forward to claim them back!
POLITICS, ISRAEL
By 1938, Austria was part of the Third Reich
Travellers in The Third Reich by Julia Boyd points out that anti-Semites simultaneously painted Jews as arch-capitalists and arch-communists. That’s also in the play in that the Merz family are wealthy factory owners while the younger members are Socialists. In 1924, Ludwig’s daughter, Nellie, is cutting the white centre from an Austrian flag to make a red flag. She is Leopold / Leonard’s mother. His father is killed in 1934 when Marxists are shelled by the Austrian army. As a footnote I knew several people who went to kibbutzes in the late 60s and early 70s and they weren’t all Jewish. It was a major Socialist enterprise.
Ludwig also discusses the creation of a Jewish state, making the point that then Jews would have a class system like everywhere else rather than being “The Jews.”
Ludwig: There isn’t a gentile anywhere who at one moment hasn’t thought ‘Jew’
Rosa’s summing up is poignant and important. She says that back in 1938, America fell 10,000 short of its permitted immigration of Jewish refugees. This is a key speech.
Stoppard could have gone much further with this point. Here I’m paraphrasing Victor Sebestyen’s 1946: The Making of The Post-War World.
While America in 1946 had the largest Jewish population in the world (4.5 million) it had the lowest numbers 1936-1946 emigrating to Palestine of any Jewish community in the world … though American money supported Zionism, only 494 American Jews chose to actually go there. In the years of Nazi persecution, America admitted 160,000 Jewish immigrants. Britain with only one fifth of the USA’s population gave refuge to 200,000 Jews in the same period. In 1946 Earl Harrison reported on the situation of concentration camp survivors in Europe. Sebestyen points out that ironically, many were fleeing Eastern Europe and heading for Germany, where Allied occupying forces were seen as a protection from local persecution elsewhere. President Truman arbitrarily decided 100,000 should be shipped to Palestine:
I feel obliged to assist the pitiful surviving remnant … I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs as my constituents.
President Truman to King Ib’n Saud, 1946
It is pointed out that Truman had to win the Democratic Jewish votes in swing states, but was also mindful of the many American anti-Semites who did not want the sick and bedraggled survivors coming into the USA … far better to dispatch them to Palestine. Here accelerated so many of the problems of the Middle East.
FOREKNOWLEDGE / PRESCIENCE
This is a balancing act when you’re setting a work of fiction in the past, but which has many resonances to recent history. When I was writing a novel set in 1967, the editor at the publisher (who later cancelled it) pulled me up firmly on this. He pointed out five or six instances of pointed prescience and said ‘They’re always irritating. Take them out.” I did. It can be done either way, proving a character remarkably prescient, or remarkably dumb. It’s having a character in 1962 saying “I’ve just seen The Beatles on TV. Believe me, they’re going to be the biggest stars in the world.” Or saying “I’ve just seen The Beatles on TV. They’ll never get anywhere.” Even worse is adding a comment, ‘Little did she know that in twenty years time, she would be the cabinet minister in charge of immigration.’ I read the play script on the train on the way back, with this in mind. After all, do characters in 1899 predict or fail to see events in 1924, or 1938? I think he teeters near the edge at times, but never falls over it!
STAGING
Gretl (Faye Castelowe) and Hermann (Adrian Scarborough)
Great writer. Great director. A marvellous cast. I’m on dodgy ground criticizing. However, I think there were bits of staging that could be improved. The first five minutes has too many people having too many dialogues and its not clear who they are, and with the piano playing and children chatting in the background, it’s a muddle.
Stage Direction Thus the chatter of children finds room where it may over, under and between Grandma’s instructions to Poldi, the proffering of cake and receiving of cake and such tête-à-tête conversation as can be made out between the sisters-in-law (Eva and Gretl) and between the brothers-in-law (Ernst and Ludwig) all to the sound of “Stille Nacht” on the piano.
Tom Stoppard, Play text, p4
Tom Stoppard is also a major screenwriter, and it’s the sort of thing that works well and easily on film, cutting in more closely to dialogues, then moving back out and into other dialogues, but it’s extremely hard to make it work live on stage, and in the first five minutes they don’t succeed.
Then there’s the side tables, each with one chair, extreme stage right and extreme stage left. With the family all doing stuff in the middle between them, Hermann and Ludwig have to conduct a dialogue across the entire width of the stage. I found that weird. Fortunately Adrian Scarborough as Hermann and Ed Stoppard as Ludwig both possess excellent projection and clarity of diction. In the earlier muddle, some of the women could have been louder and clearer.
The family dinner
Then we have a family dinner. Actually, Stoppard does this in Arcadia (and Shakespeare does in Macbeth!), which is having a scene around a long table with some speaking characters inevitably with their backs to us. One is Gretl and Faye Castelowe is always a marvellous actor, and having done a couple of lines with her back to audience, contrives to turn sideways for the next. It has been thought out well … in that three of those with backs to us are non-speaking children.
I read and re-read the character descriptions and the family tree in the programme. The family tree is the one Rosa has written out for Nathan and the English survivor, Leo. Like Stoppard in his interview, it needs explaining to them who these people were. Incidentally, the ageing of the major characters between 1899 and 1938 is excellent wigs and make-up. Completely believable.
1955: Nathan (Sebastian Armesto) the camp survivor
In the end, there really are so many characters and some do not get enough lines / space / time to establish who they are. I didn’t think the female characters came out as strongly as the male ones, though Rosa’s final great scene compensates somewhat. To be fair Stoppard is aware of this, using Gretl to demonstrate … she calls a child her grandson, then explains that it’s her sister-in-law’s sister’s grandson and that she’s confused. So were we!
A lot of the family relationship was only clarified in reading the text afterwards. I’d love to see it again equipped with that knowledge.
It is the major fault in the play, and yet the large number of them is precisely the thing that makes the end so moving.
OVERALL
Yes, it is a major play. On a first viewing, I’m going for four stars (or 4.5 stars). I’d rate Adrian Scarborough and Luke Thallon as five star performances, as were many moments in the play, and certainly the sound effects and music. The ending was as good as theatre ever gets. Also two days later, we were still discussing it.
In the end, though, it just misses five stars, because you really need a primer to work out all the characters … and the same is true of Shakespeare’s History plays. I guess that’ll be no problem in ten years time when the A-Level English students of 2030 are taken along to see a production after having studied it!
****
THEATRE …
Full marks in having the play on sale at a discount … £7.99 instead of Amazon’s £9.99. They also had hardbacks at £14.99, and the programme was a standard £4.50, for those of us who remembers the Cumberbatch Hamlet programme at £8. Ice cream was £3 which is standard too.
I’ve never seen so many people waving NO MOBILE PHONE signs nor such loud and repeated announcements. On the plus side it worked!
It still has terribly inadequate toilets.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
5 star
Mark Shenton, London Theatre.com *****
4 star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
After an overwrought first act, Stoppard brings everything to an unforgettable theatrical climax in the second. Luke Thallon, brittle and thoroughly British, plays 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.
Tim Bano, The Stage ****
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail ****
Thanks to the author’s love of complex ideas, we are also treated to digresssions on the geometry of cat’s cradles, and debates about the politics of a Jewish homeland versus the joys of cultural assimilation.
Sarah Crompton, What’s on Stage, ****
It’s an evening that leaves many people in tears. It left me profoundly moved but also full of thought and understanding. If it is Stoppard’s last play, as he seems to imply, it is a very fine testament to all he has given and all he has learnt.
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times ****
I never quite mastered the names of all the characters and was grateful afterwards for the programme’s family tree … Dramatically the evening also suffers, like any story about the Holocaust, from inevitability. We know things are goingto end horribly, and we brace ourselves.
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out, ****
Nick Curtis, Standard ****
Matt Wolf, The i ****
A cast numbering more than 40 means that some characters do get lost in the shuffle: this is a rare play I found myself wishing were longer so that certain relationships, not to mention themes of self-identity and spiritual affiliation, had greater room to breathe. But Patrick Marber, the keen director, knits this cat’s cradle of a play into an elegant and elegiac whole that locates every baleful note of Stoppard’s likely swan song.
3 star
Arifa Akbar, Guardian ***
Claire Allfree, Metro ***
2 star
Clive Davis, The Times **
Clive Davis went on to mention his out-of-step rating subsequently:
A good play shouldn’t make us feel like dimwits … Aside from a genuinely moving final scene, I thought that the play was a mediocre family chronicle, overstuffed with semi-digested research. Almost every other reviewer seemed to believe it was a near masterpiece. Did I really get it that wrong? I console myself with the thought that three oif my Times colleagues agreed with me. (My advice would be to save your money and read George Clare’s beautiful memoir, “Last Waltz in Vienna”, one of Stoppard’s inspirations).
The Times, Clive Davis Notebook, 19 February 2020
Don’t use star ratings …
Lloyd Evans, The Spectator
At press night, the critics were busy scribbling one-liners which are destined to reach the dictionary of quotations. ‘Why do Jews have to choose between pushy and humble?’ ‘Today’s modern is tomorrow’s nostalgia: we missed Mahler when we heard Schoenberg.’ …
… This play is a vast undertaking, artistically and commercially, and it won’t make much profit because the 40-strong company is exceptionally large. Revivals are unlikely to follow for the same reason. The queue will be enormous. Join it and be glad.
David Benedict, Variety
Despite the entire cast working to add personal characteristics, the more we see the arguments moving into historical focus over time — the play jump-cuts to successive generations — the more almost all of the people on stage become dangerously expository mouthpieces for ideas rather than fully-fledged characters. That makes it hard to follow who’s who, and harder still to connect on an individual basis.
Jan Moir, Daily Mail
There are no scenes inside a concentration camp and only one character in a Nazi armband, yet the implication of violence and hatred suffuses everything. Nearly all the action takes place in the Merz apartment, which is gradually stripped of its riches as the play and history progress. In the end, there is nothing left but bare walls and ghosts, the looted Klimt long gone.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
TOM STOPPARD
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, 2015 Brighton Theatre Royal / ETT at Bath
Travesties, by Tom Stoppard, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2016
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Old Vic 2017
PATRICK MARBER
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Old Vic 2017
Don Juan in Soho, Wyndham’s Theatre, 2017
The Beaux Stratagem, National Theatre (additional dramaturgy)
FAYE CASTELOW
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Headlong 2011 (Hermia)
The Roaring Girl by Dekker & Middleton, RSC 2014 (Mary Fitzallard)
The Witch of Edmonton, by Rowley, Dekker, Ford, RSC 2014 (Susan)
The White Devil by John Webster, RSC 2014 (Isabella)
Man and Superman by Bernard Shaw, National Theatre 2014 (Violet)
The Rover by Aphra Benn, RSC, 2016
ADRIAN SCARBOROUGH
King Lear, National Theatre 2014 (The Fool)
Don Juan in Soho, Wyndham’s Theatre, 2017
1917(film) 2020
DOROTHEA MYER-BENNETT
Pericles, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015
The Merchant of Venice – Globe (Nerissa)
Two Gentlemen of Verona – Tobacco Factory (Julia)
The Spire by William Golding (Salisbury) (Goody)
LUKE THALLON
Present Laughter, by Noel Coward, Old Vic 2019
Albion, by Mike Bartlett, Almeida Theatre 2017
JENNA AUGEN
Bartholomew Fair, by Ben Jonson, Wanamaker Playhouse 2019
The Way of The World, by William Congreve, Chichester, 2012
ELEANOR WYLD
Don Juan in Soho, Wyndham’s Theatre, 2017
Doctor Faustus, RSC 2016
Don Quixote, RSC 2016
YASMIN PAIGE
Ah! Wilderness, by Eugene O’Neill, Young Vic 2015
SADIE SHIMMIN
Echo’s End, Saisbury Playhouse, 2017
Hi, Peter.
Don’t know if you remember me – David Simmons, OUP France – the man who, to his eternal shame put you up in a crap hotel in Marseille back in the late 1980s and who played Watson to your Sherlock in busting a school in Aix-en-Provence who were selling pirated Streamline tapes!
Anyway, I just wanted to write to say how much I enjoyed and appreciated your review of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, by far the best and most informative critique I have read. I first saw the play in London last August when theatres reopened and was intensely moved by it. I have now caught up with it a second time in Cambridge (where I live) through the NT Live broadcast on Holocaust Memorial Day. I found it even more powerful second time round – it involves such a large cast and so many story-lines that a second viewing really did clarify things. Even if it is a bit clunky at times (almost inevitably so, given the length of time and the sheer number of lives it encompasses), it is an extraordinarily strong personal statement – both as a historical tableau and the testimony of a man coming to terms with a past of which he has been to some extent in denial if not in ignorance.
This time around, there were many more uncomfortable ripples of ironic laughter when the young Leonard talked about his pride in being English. We all knew why this resonated so strongly at this time when our leaders have an uncomfortable relationship with truth and are guilty of debasing language to the point where words – to the extent that they are signifiers of values – lose their meaning, the first step on the road to societal breakdown.
Like you, I had family members who were present at Bergen Belsen. My family is, in fact, Jewish but, on my mother’s side at least, has lived in Britain since Cromwell allowed the Jews to return in 1656 – so, although we believe we did lose some distant family members, we were spared the horror directly. Except that my mother’s brother, aged 20, was a driver in the British army in one of the first convoys to enter Belsen where he caught one of the diseases that were rife in the camp and died weighing less than five stone several months later – my mother up to her dying day in 2017 could not really bring herself to talk about this.
Like you, I found Travellers in the Third Reich fascinating and informative and, only this week, I saw the new Robert Harris: The Edge of War – so interesting that Stoppard also rehabilitates Chamberlain to some extent by giving Leo/Leonard his surname. By the by, I don’t know if you have read the great Philippe Sands wonderful book, East West Street, an extraordinary detective story delving into his own history and a meditation on memory, guilt and justice.
Anyway, this is a very long mail to say thank you for your inspiring critique – and to say it would be lovely to see you at some point. We have a timeshare in Lansdowne and come to Bournemouth for two weeks every July so, if you are around and feel like it, it would be great to catch up.
All the best
David
LikeLike
Just a quick note to say that “Chamberlain” is the name of Stoppard’s secretary and is used for minor characters in many of his plays.
(This is a terrific blog by the way.)
LikeLike
David, of course I remember you. I’m sure you both came here for coffee once. Do get in touch when you’re around here … message me or e-mail. Let’s go for a meal somewhere. If only our pirate busting exploits had extended to video. I remember the hotel in Marseilles – the third time someone tried the door handle, I moved the wardrobe across the door. Also walking down to the old port on a Friday evening was really scary.
LikeLike