Leopoldstadt

I have been round the houses with Stoppard. When I was 17, I found his emotionally-light, intellectually-playful plays very suited to my emotionally-averse, would-be-intellectual budding personality. Plays like Travesties and Jumpers and After Magritte and more just seemed to fizz with theatrical energy. When I read and saw more plays by other people and read more actual philosophy and grew up a bit, I found I looked more for an emotional pull and found Stoppard’s intellectual dazzle less impressive. It was still a somewhat pretentious position, a personality in search of an identity. In the early nineties, he seemed adrift, to have lost his way, his best work behind him and so he was quite easy - well, I found him quite easy - to dismiss. But then he wrote Arcadia, which, even at the height of my facile rejection, I had to admit was fucking superb. But then he wrote The Invention of Love, which I liked but not as much as Arcadia, and then the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, each part of which I liked less than the last. I found Rock ‘n’ Roll a misfire (and really shouldn’t have been on at the Royal Court in its 50th year), and I wasn’t convinced by The Hard Problem, his knotty take on the problem of conscious (though when I chaired an event at the National Theatre about Stoppard and his work and had to interview him, as he came up on the stage my heart was fluttering with nervous awe and I realised that my teenage adulation was still in there somewhere).

But now I’ve seen Leopoldstadt and everything is up in the air again. Is there a precedent for a playwright writing perhaps their best play in their eighties, fifty-seven years after their first produced play? Ibsen wrote the magnificent Little Eyolf in late age, but he was still only 66, which by comparison to Stoppard makes him a whippersnapper (and it was only 44 years after his first produced play). Beckett was 66 when he wrote the incomparable Not I and 75 when he wrote Rockaby. But that’s still not Stoppard’s 82 - and, good as they are are they his best?

But Leopoldstadt is extraordinary. It’s breathtaking. If you haven’t seen it, it follows various generations of a Viennese Jewish family from 1899 to 1955, that period of time crucially, of course, passing through the Holocaust. It is a vast play in time and in cast, though not in geography remaining in the same huge drawing room for almost all of its many scenes. Despite the vast number of characters, we come to love many of them; we understand the family rivalries, the secrets, the in-jokes. And so, as time jerks forward, as it does, it is with a real sense of grief that we find this person has taken their own life, this person has left the country, this person has fallen ill, this person and this person and this person have been killed.

A motif that runs through the play is the person who has become an unperson. There are images of people who have denied their identity; people who have died and live on only as a portrait and then the portrait is displaced, anonymised; photographs of people in an album whose names none of the living can supply. These hints appear from the beginning and they are not just a foreshadowing of the death camps; in some ways it’s also an image of family and memory and how the present falls bumpily into the past. But it is also an image of the Holocaust, the almost-innumerable millions who died.

Almost innumerable. There are restrained hints of the old intellectual dazzle in the multiple generations of mathematicians in the play which delicately reminds us that sometimes the great statistics (six million) are hard to connect to their real referents (all the individual dead). It asks whether the world of numbers is a way of making sense of the world or escaping from it. There are other elegant touches like this: the play begins in 1899 with two cousins discussing the recently-published Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud and there are moments where the overlay of past and present, the sudden ageing of a character, seems dreamlike but then Freud himself is brought into the story, given refuge from the Nazis in 1938. They also discuss Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde), whose serial couplings are echoed in the story at one point (indeed a copy of Reigen seems to be a key tool in the seduction). But unlike the Stoppard of the 70s to the 90s, there is no bravura intellectual glitter here; it’s just part of the intellectual seriousness of the world of the play and of the play. The numbers are not allowed to take over and turn into paradox; the innumerable missing millions - through their avatars in this family - stay on the retina and indeed, at the end of the play, return briefly, magically, plangently, restored to heartbreaking theatrical life.

How to describe the writing? It is, in a certain way, old-fashioned. The wit of the dialogue takes us back to the middle of the twentieth century. It’s absolutely sparkling. Clever people saying cleverer things than even very clever people say, even cleverer than Stoppard would say. But this works, because it’s not just entertaining the audience. It’s giving us an intense sense of the cultural richness of the Viennese Jewish life at the turn of the century, amid Freud, and Mahler and Schnitzler and Klimt. It is verbally opulent as these characters are mentally opulent. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking that the play begins in 1899, a moment of confidence, of modernism, a sense of a new century. (Memorably one character notes of The Interpretation of Dreams ‘There’s something about a new theory being published at the very beginning of a new century. Like an augury. Like the curtain going up on something’. They don’t realise that what Freud’s theory perhaps augurs is less the new lucidity of dreams, but the eruption into the world of nightmare.)

But if the dialogue is, in the best way, old fashioned, the structure is beautifully contemporary, expertly mixing together short and long scenes, making exquisite choices about what scenes to show and what to imply, where to focus and where (for example the Holocaust itself) to leap across. The rhythm of this play, my god, it’s impeccable. My one regret is that, for social distancing reasons, I guess the theatre have decided an interval is impossible: there is what I am assuming most have been the curtain moment at the end of scene six, where the character, before the First World War, behind dancing together. They dance with a brisk, almost martial confidence, and couples join them and the music swells and then it starts to be punctuated by gunfire and artillery, the dancing getting more and more clipped and defiant, the music building to a deafening and threatening point and then - the curtain comes down.

The play does lurch from era to era, taking us from the turn of the century in the first scene to the post-WWI period, then into the late 30s and then into the 50s. But these lurches are always emotional pulls. The work of the audience is like someone in the aftermath of an earthquake: we have quickly to check what has happened, whether everyone is alright, what has changed and what has broken. Cumulatively, it’s devastating. I only had my doubts about the writing once; there is a scene where the Nazis bullyingly and sneeringly requisition the house and I wondered if these weren’t slightly off-the-peg-Nazis, but in fact because we have come to know the family - and the house - so intimately, the scene still packs a punch, perhaps even gratifyingly giving them a richer fuller life than their persecutor.

There are hints of other Stoppard plays. In the discussion of Herzen and the calls for a Jewish homeland, we feel like we are watching a fourth part of Coast of Utopia. In the way we see the same house over generations, I thought of Arcadia, particularly in the 1955 scene as the survivors, the link to the past almost entirely broken, struggle to remember the meaning of what happened there in the past. There is the classic sparkling Stoppard dialogue throughout and a typically brilliant little image at the beginning that speaks sonorously about the cultural conflicts and conflicts that the family will make throughout: a Star of David atop a Christmas Tree.

Most important, though, there is, as in The Real Thing, a sly, oblique self-portrait. In the final scene, we meet Leonard, who was once Leopold (and thus is almost the eponymous hero). He was a refugee from Vienna, whose Jewishness has been effaced in that English way. Leonard is comic writer and a celebrated witty speaker. He is fairly clearly a bit of a Stoppard. When Leonard reflects that ‘in England, it wasn’t something you had to know, or something people had to know about other people’, you sense a tension, both in Leonard and Stoppard too. On one hand, how wonderful, after all we have seen, the gloating anti-semitism, the agonies over cross-faith marriages, the parsing out of one’s identity into Viennese, Jew, internationalist, liberal, democrat, and then the rise of the Nazis, the cruelty, the mob violence, kristallnacht, and the camps. By comparison, how wonderful to find a life where these things don’t matter, where perhaps ignorance or distance or good manners sweep so much of that away. (This is not to claim, of course, that antisemitism was or is absent in British life; the last few years have made that horrifyingly clear.) But Leo and Tom are torn because that also feels like an evasion and a lie. An evasion of the real horrors that have imprinted a fugitive, haunted, quicksilver brilliance to Jewish cultural identity, an eye for the escape route, an ability to absorb culture fiercely because you know, at some moment, you may have to take it with you, in your memory. In the scene, We have seen Leo in an earlier scene holding in the pain and the tears from a bad cut from a broken cup, not wanting to make his presence any more felt than it need be when there are Nazis in the house. Now, his cousin, Nathan, points out the scar and Leo, in the same but stripped room that the accident occurs, finds it flooding back. The scar is not just physical. And one senses here that Stoppard, too, has recovered in preparing for this play a moment of reckoning and responsibility to his own identity, wanting to locate, under the dazzle and the glitter, the truth of things, the weight of the past, to bear witness to suffering, and to take himself seriously. It’s a beautifully written scene, the most powerful of the whole play.

Stoppard is not the sort of writer to force contemporary parallels on his audience. Indeed, he could hardly have predicted what the scene where they discuss the reluctance of western countries to exceed their quotas for taking in Jewish refugees would feel like in a theatre in August 2021 after the collapse of Afghanistan to the Taliban. But the early scenes and the later scenes as the characters complacently insist that the worst will not happen or will not happen again, as we all note the reappearance of fascism in the heart of European and American politics, send an appropriate frisson through its audience.

Sorry for not saying much about Patrick Marber’s production: it’s beautifully paced, open, witty, serious where it needs to be. The enormous cast are blistering as they take us into hell, not putting a foot wrong. Richard Hudson’s set is opulent and haunted, solid and evanescent.

Anyway, I’m 20 months late in seeing this play but it may be Stoppard’s best and, I now find myself thinking, Stoppard’s best is pretty close to the best of the best.