CTJC Pesach bulletin 2020

Leopoldstadt Julian Landy Any new play by Sir Tom Stoppard is a great event. Not that they are few in number, but that they are slower in forthcoming than formerly.

Stoppard is 82. It must be doubtful that he will pen any further dramas for production. So for the purposes of this review I assume this is his swan-song. We all know of what he is capable: hilarious and complex intellectual jokes intertwined with complex scientific theories; a dramatic progression and flexible time-frames. Little is simple or straightforward in Stoppard plays. Until Leopoldstadt.

Now we are given a simple and straightforward story (with some limited allusions to mathematical theory) the end of which the audience knows almost as soon as the play begins. Hence, with small exceptions, there is no real dramatic thrust. How could there be, when Stoppard is telling us about the Holocaust? Sir Tom can be properly called a National Treasure. He is, without question, the greatest British playwright of the last fifty years. Productions of his plays are put on all over the world and do not fail to charm. And yet.

And yet, this is very different. It is the story of a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. And so the play is horribly predictable. The family seeks to see itself as Viennese first and of Jewish origin second. Some have married out, some converted to Catholicism. Gradually we get beyond the Anschluss and to war.

Nothing is the same. And once a Jew, always a Jew. The play opens with a complex set and a stage crowded with people, multiple conversations and events. There are over twenty actors performing.

There is a very funny Seder night where the family retires after the meal, not to doze but to dance!

The acting throughout is excellent: even the several child actors are great. The whole production speaks of the highest quality, the music, the lighting and the sets. But by the end just three members of the extended family survive on an almost bare stage. One lives here in England, presumably Stoppard’s alter ego, one in New York and one back in Vienna, where the three meet for an unexpected reunion. It is Page 16