{"id":1757,"date":"2020-02-21T16:53:11","date_gmt":"2020-02-21T16:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1757"},"modified":"2020-02-21T16:53:21","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T16:53:21","slug":"from-caftan-to-opera-hat-the-greatest-living-playwright-takes-on-the-jewish-bourgeoisie-and-its-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2020\/02\/from-caftan-to-opera-hat-the-greatest-living-playwright-takes-on-the-jewish-bourgeoisie-and-its-destruction.html","title":{"rendered":"From caftan to opera hat: the greatest living playwright takes on the Jewish bourgeoisie and its destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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There\u2019s something a bit ho-hum, mean and pinched about the reception of Sir Tom Stoppard\u2019s new (and, he says, perhaps final play), Leopoldstadt<\/em>. A minority has treated its opening this February in the 1899 Wyndham\u2019s Theatre as a perfectly ordinary event, nothing special in the long history of the British theatre or, indeed, in the chronicles of theatre. This misses the significance, not of the matter of the play, but of the creation of the play itself.  There was, after all, only one subject that remained for Stoppard to write about. He has in his dramas dealt with most of the perennial problems of philosophy, from the subjective versus mathematical conceptions of time and space, to language, logic and ontology, from ethics to politics, to our psychology and emotions from love to hate. He has posed problems, puzzles and their resolutions, teased us and played with us, his audience, almost always treating us as his moral and intellectual equals. He has never preached, or harangued us, or tried to teach us lessons, though there is much learning in his plays, and sometimes conclusions to be drawn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though, like the late Sir\nJonathan Miller, and many others (including myself), Stoppard regards himself\nas Jew-ish, non-observant and unbelieving, it is obvious that this 82-year-old\nplaywright had eventually to write about the Holocaust and, given his\nbackground and his gifts, that this play would be his masterpiece \u2013 and a major\npart of his legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Why? Because the history of the Jews and what happened to them in the 20th<\/sup> century is also his story; he owns (at least a part of) it. Born Tom\u00e1\u0161 Straussler on 3 July 1937 in Zl\u00edn, Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, Stoppard\u2019s family left on 15 March 1939, the very day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Zl\u00edn was the company town of the huge Bata Shoe making firm; they had a factory in Singapore, and by all accounts tried to look after their Jewish employees. So his father, a Bata company doctor, was transferred there, before escaping to Australia, avoiding the Japanese invasion. In 1941, aged five, he was evacuated to Darjeeling with his brother, Petr. They were sent to Mount Hermon school, a Christian boarding school with an American-style curriculum. Following their father\u2019s death, their mother married a British Army Major Kenneth Stoppard, and the boys took his surname. In 1946, the family arrived in England, and young Tom felt he had been given the (Cecil Rhodes attributed) winning ticket in the lottery of life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            This is the\npart of his own story that the playwright knew; the more interesting aspect is\nwhat he didn\u2019t know, but discovered, and that allowed \u2013compelled \u2013 him to write\nLeopoldstadt<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1996, following the death of\nhis mother, Stoppard began to learn about his Czech family. All four grandparents\nwere Jews, and died in camps such as Terezin and Auschwitz, as did three of his\nmother\u2019s sisters. As long ago as 1998 he returned to Zl\u00edn, marking a milestone\nin his journey of appreciating his Jewishness. This gorgeous world premi\u00e8re of Leopoldstadt<\/em>,\ndirected by Patrick Marber (a first-rate playwright in his own right), with stunning\nperiod sets and costumes by Richard Hudson and Brigitte Reifenstall, and cunning\nlighting by Neil Austin, opens with what appears to be an old family photograph.\nIt is 1899, and the huge cast of upper bourgeois family and servants are led by\nHermann Merz, a baptised Jewish businessman, and his Catholic wife, Gretl (excellent\nperformances by a first complacent, then nervy Adrian Scarborough, and Faye\nCastelow, who is not so ditsy as she appears when attending her first family\nseder). There are several fine performances, including that of the playwright\u2019s\nson, Ed Stoppard, as Merz\u2019s Jewish brother-in-law, a mathematician obsessed\nwith Riemann\u2019s Conjecture; Sebastian Armesto, who plays Jacob in the 1924\nsegment of the play, and Nathan in 1955; and Luke Thallon, who excels both as\nGretl\u2019s lover, Fritz, in the 1900 portion, and Leo in 1955. In this last role, \u201cLeo\u201d\nseems to recapitulate the playwright\u2019s own discovery of being Jewish and what\nthat means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The events depicted include a Christmas\ncelebration where there\u2019s a telling kerfuffle about whether to put a star of\nDavid at the top of the tree; a Passover seder; the painting of Gretl\u2019s\nportrait by Klimt; and the Anschluss on 12 March 1938 \u2013 for Stoppard has set\nthe play not in his native Czechoslovakia, but has moved it to Vienna. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This makes great dramatic \u2013 and historical\n\u2013 sense, as it makes more familiar to us the place and situation of the Jewish\nbourgeoisie as the new century unfolds. Indeed, the clue is in the name of the\nplay. Before I saw the play or read the text, I was discussing it with a close\nfriend, Dr Ernest Kafka, a Viennese-born, retired Freudian psychoanalyst. Until\nAnschluss he lived with his Jewish banker father and musician mother in a grand\nflat off the Ringstrasse. He queried the title of the play: Leopoldstadt, he explained,\nwas where the less affluent, even working-class Jews lived, as many of them had\ncome from the east, and were not always German-speakers. As Hermann puts it in\nthe play, boasting of the family\u2019s exodus from Leopoldstadt to the Ringstrasse,\n\u201cMy grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I\nhave the singers to dinner \u2013 actors, writers, musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The events of the play echo my\nfriend Ernie\u2019s childhood (as he has written about it in his soon-to-be\npublished memoir). In particular, Hermann Merz\u2019s misplaced earlier confidence\nin the shelter and beneficence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his belief\nin assimilation as the solution to the Jewish predicament. For many years Ernie\nfound fault with his own father for not moving the family from Austria before the\nAnschluss \u2013 until learning that his father, who owned one of the two Jewish\nbanks authorised to do foreign exchange, had remained in Vienna (up to the\npoint of being arrested by the Gestapo), in order to move to safety the assets\nof his Jewish clients. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Stoppard has got the look, the\ntone (and thanks to Adam Cork, the sound) of the era exactly right. His\ninvented stage family is almost too large to take in at a single viewing, and\nthe play will reward repeated visits; but having read the near-novelistic\nscript, I can appreciate retrospectively the nuances that the play makes\nvisible. Grim though the end of the play has to be (if it is to respect history\nand truth, as well as evoke the only feelings it is possible to have), it is not\nwithout humour. Circumcision and its (to me, grisly) rites provide a good deal\nof comic business, amounting to farce when the young mother repeatedly changes\nher mind. There are some of Stoppard\u2019s favourite mathematical conundrums, and a\ntouch of philosophy, too, in the repeated motif of the cat\u2019s cradle constructed\nby some of the terrific young actors \u2013 the kind of intellectually challenging\nfun Stoppard is so skilled in providing from Jumpers<\/em> to Arcadia<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a resonance in the ending\nof Leopoldstadt<\/em>, to which not even all Jewish-descent families can lay\nclaim, and for all its light-hearted moments, this drama is deadly serious. It\nis, after all, a chronicle of murder. Unlike many of Jewish descent, I have\nbeen spared: if members of my family were among the victims, I don\u2019t know their\nidentities. The litany of Stoppard\u2019s lost relatives is a catalogue of grief, detailed\nwith the grace and elegance we would expect from our greatest living playwright,\nin what, I am certain, will come to be seen as his finest play yet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s something a bit ho-hum, mean and pinched about the reception of Sir Tom Stoppard\u2019s new (and, he says, perhaps final play), Leopoldstadt. A minority has treated its opening this February in the 1899 Wyndham\u2019s Theatre as a perfectly ordinary event, nothing special in the long history of the British theatre or, indeed, in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[4657,4667,4664,4659,4660,4668,4654,4666,4661,4662,4663,4665,4658,4653,4655,4656],"class_list":{"0":"post-1757","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"tag-british-theatre","10":"tag-ed-stoppard","11":"tag-ernest-kafka","12":"tag-jew","13":"tag-jewish","14":"tag-klimt","15":"tag-leopoldstadt","16":"tag-luke-thallan","17":"tag-moravia","18":"tag-nazis","19":"tag-patrick-marber","20":"tag-sebasian-armesto","21":"tag-sir-jonathan-miller","22":"tag-stoppard","23":"tag-vienna","24":"tag-ziln","25":"entry","26":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-sl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1757"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1762,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757\/revisions\/1762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}