Leopoldstadt is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited new play since The Hard Problem , released in 2015 in London's NT. At 82, the British playwright believes his recent installment will also be the last: "It takes an average of four years between each performance," he said, ironically but lucidly, to John Wilson on BBC Radio 4. Patrick Marber, colleague and Collaborator of Stoppard (with triumphs like the Travestis revival in 2016), he has been in charge of directing Leopoldstadt at Wyndham's Theater, where he was splendidly welcomed on February 12 and will not return until April 26, due to closure due to of the Coronavirus.
In the case of Stoppard, it is a short work (2h 40 minutes) but it has a difficult tour: paid for by a team of producers led by the powerful Sonia Friedman, it has a cast of no less than 41 interpreters.
I have read it these days of confinement and it has made me travel far: to Vienna, from 1899 to 1955. The work, which could be described as "intimate epic", takes place almost entirely in the large living room of an Austrian family, the Merz-Jacobovicz, whose four generations mix Jewish and Catholic branches into a vertigo-producing family tree (and included in the program). Leopoldstadt , majestic and pointillist, is Stoppard's piece that is most subtly and intensely about memory, and the one most closely related to his own history: a declaration of love for Judaism, a property that until now has been scarce in his writings. It is not a portrait of the Stoppard family, but the protagonists have a lot of it, in the same way that in the British essence of the young Leo it is not difficult to identify the playwright. That is another superb story. In the early 1990s, Stoppard (born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia) discovered not only his Jewish identity but also the deaths of his uncles and grandparents, whom he hardly knew, killed by the Nazis. He lived childhood with his mother in Singapore, and then in England with his brother and with her. His mother never wanted to tell them anything about his previous life, but Tom / Leo travels to Vienna and there they reveal many things to him, in a scene as concise as it is memorable.
To be an epic , pieces characterized by the turbulence of its river of events, Leopoldstadt starts with a long, delicate and slow passage, soaked in elegiac air and drops of Proustian perfume. In the large living room, chaired by grandmother Emilia; his son, the industrialist Hermann, and his wife, Gretl, a Catholic, who poses for Klimt, about twenty relatives eat, chat, play the piano, and passionately discuss (we are in the world of Stoppard) about art, mathematics, religion, the promised land, the irruption of psychoanalysis, themes that seem cold but draw very well times and characters. Great brotherhood, ironically represented by the little one who crowns the Christmas fir tree with the star of David, provoking this replica of the grandmother: “Poor thing! What can be expected of a boy who was baptized and circumcised the same week? You have to have a great talent to draw the feelings, the irony, the strength, the contained anguish, without loading the inks, like a cross between Granville Barker and a powerful episode of Downton Abbey. Or the only “outside” scene, where a lieutenant of dragons embodies the fearsome rise of anti-Semitism, followed by a jump to 1938, on the eve of the Austrian capture by the Reich; with a tempo similar to that of the Christmas evening, but with an increasingly dark and disturbing tone. The family tries to carry a simulacrum of normal life, until we hear a crash of boots going up the stairs, screams and cries, iconic broken glass and broken doors, and we feel silence and panic on the upper floor. A Nazi bureaucrat and without a uniform comes to fulfill his sinister mission: to empty the house and take them away.
We go back, as in a flash, to 1900, a Seder celebration night. Are we dreaming or do we think we see Hermann, Ludwig, Ernst, Gretl again, when everything still seemed possible? Then comes, in 1955, the terrible and delicate final scene, in which Leo and Rosa, who have just met, visit the almost demolished mansion and talk about the family's destinies: a list in which to evoke the disappeared is enough responding to each name with the name of a concentration camp, or the word "suicide", and the phrase "died in his bed" comes as a blessing. For me, it is the culmination of Stoppard's work and career: it does not need more for us to be moved by the deaths of people whom we hardly knew, such is the truth that exhales what he has been able to tell us ("written over a year, but excavated for a long time ”) the dean of British dramaturgy.
Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt was published in English by Faber & Faber (London) in February 2020.
Stoppard Poker
Difficult to choose among the thirty pieces of Stoppard, but there goes a poker (with a trio). 1) Sweeping debut: Rosencranz and Guildernstern are dead (1966) launched his career in Edinburgh. Two minor Hamlet characters caught in a black farce they don't understand. 2) Arcadia (1993). Masterpiece. Two time series, three literary researchers and a teenager, the fascinating Lady Tomasina Coverley, who in the shadow of Byron discovers chaos theory a few decades in advance. 3) The Utopia Coast (2002). Dazzling, ambitious trilogy (Voyage, Shipwreck, Rescue) that covers the encounters of Bakunin, Herzen, Turgueniev and Belinsky, between 1833 and 1868, over nine hours. 4) Rock'n'Roll (2006). Another gem of dramatic combinatorics that mixes the revolts of Prague, the chronicle of a family from Cambrige through a Czech student fascinated by rock culture, and the legend of Syd Barrett, one of the kings of psychedelia.