74 Books & arts The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020
T
he original title of his haunting new
play, Sir Tom Stoppard confides, was “A
Family Album”. The name was changed,
but the album survives. The curtain rises
on an assimilated Jewish household in Vi-
enna in the winter of 1899, where Her-
mann, a prosperous convert to Catholi-
cism, and Ludwig, his brother-in-law, are
discussing the liberality of Austria and the
necessity of Zionism. “To a homeland for
the Jews!” they toast. “Happy Christmas!”
As children gambol around them, Ludwig’s
sister, Wilma, and Grandma Emilia flip
through old pictures. “It’s still an amazing
thing to me,” Wilma reflects, “to know the
faces of the dead!” As for a relative who
lived before photography, “no one knows
what she looked like any more than if she’d
been some kind of rumour.”
The moment, Sir Tom says, “makes ex-
plicit something that is part of the play’s
fabric”, namely the question of “remem-
bering and misremembering”. “Leopold-
stadt”, which opened at Wyndham’s The-
atre in London on February 12th, is about
memory and forgetting in all their forms.
At the most superficial level, the characters
keep struggling to pin down how they are
related; at the deepest looms the oblivion
of the Holocaust. Off-stage, meanwhile, the
catastrophe at the play’s heart is passing
out of living memory, as the generation
that survived it dwindles.
That generation is also the playwright’s,who was born Tomas Straussler in Czecho-
slovakia in 1937. When Leo, a character in
“Leopoldstadt” who is saved as a child—
and later writes “funny books” in Eng-
land—reappears in Vienna in 1955, the
drama “superimposes itself on my experi-
ence”, Sir Tom says. The parallel is inexact:
Leo makes it across the Channel on the eve
of the war, whereas, after his parents fled,
Sir Tom spent much of it in India. His fa-
ther was killed in a Japanese bombard-
ment; he moved to England, and became a
devoted Englishman, after his mother re-
married to a British officer. The play is set
in Vienna, not Czechoslovakia, in part to
underscore the distinction.
But, like Leo’s, Sir Tom’s own mother
“never looked back and never spoke about”
what had happened. Which, as he discov-
ered only after communism collapsed and
a cousin came to visit, was that all his
grandparents, among other relatives, had
been murdered.Never never never never never
A play takes four years to put together, Sir
Tom reckons, so that, if he writes another,
he would be pushing 87 when it opened.
“Do people write plays at 87? Who knows?”
Whether or not it proves a finale, “Leopold-
stadt” showcases the motifs of a dazzling
career that began even before “Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead” made him
famous in 1967. As with the tortoise in “Ar-cadia” (1993) there are symbolically recur-
ring objects, as well as multiple time-
frames and cerebral dialogue that covers
Freud and mathematics as well as politics.
Only now has he written directly about the
Holocaust, but he has always taken on de-
manding themes, from philosophy in
“Jumpers” (1972) to neuroscience in “The
Hard Problem” (2015). And, as always, “Leo-
poldstadt” is wonderfully, defiantly funny.
Some of the gags are frivolous. “Do you
happen to have a cigar-cutter?” asks a
smoker who gatecrashes a circumcision
and is mistaken for the moheldoing the
snipping. “Don’t worry, I can bite it off.”
Some are pointed. Leo’s pride in Britain
was “ubiquitous” in the post-war years, Sir
Tom says, but his paean to the country’s
royal family and its hospitality to refugees
will sound bitterly ironic to London ears
today. Some of the jokes are traps. Her-
mann makes an anti-Semitic quip to Lud-
wig. The audience laughs. “Do you mind if I
take that back?” Hermann says. But it is too
late to take back the laughter. (In Patrick
Marber’s production, Ludwig is played by
Ed Stoppard, Sir Tom’s son, piquant casting
in a story that touches on family business-
es and what fathers leave their children.)
The ultimate, savage dramatic irony—
the fate that the audience knows but the
characters cannot—is foreshadowed in the
play’s name. After all, Leopoldstadt is not
the fine Viennese district where the cul-
tured family live, but the site of the ghetto
that they wrongly think they have escaped.
Hermann is confident that the “pogroms,
ghettos, yellow patches” have all been
“rolled up and dumped like an old carpet”,
yet ambitions and romances keep bump-
ing up against the cage of anti-Semitism.
“The question of Judaism is in everything if
you’re a Jew,” comments Sir Tom. “It enters
into every conversation.”
In scenes that unfold and contrast like
the movements of a musical score, the ac-
tion shifts to the political maelstrom of
1924, after some of the characters have
fought and died for Austria. By 1938 one is
enrolled in a school for butlers in the hope
of getting an exit visa as a domestic ser-
vant. Finally comes the coda in 1955.
The combination of music and trauma
is another Stoppardian motif. A spectral or-
chestra haunts a Soviet psychiatric insti-
tute in “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour”
(1977); in “Rock ’n’ Roll” (2006), Czech rock-
ers undermine communism. In the tragic
diminuendoof “Leopoldstadt”, the sympho-
ny of the early family gatherings subsides
to a bare trio, one of whom—Leo, the witty
Englishman—carries a trace of the ghetto
in his name. The quicksilver repartee for
which Sir Tom is renowned is hushed. As
he puts it, “the language becomes elemen-
tary”, then disintegrates in a way that ech-
oes the ending of “King Lear”. At the close, a
single word reverberates: Auschwitz. 7A powerful drama of the Holocaust from one of the world’s greatest playwrightsTom Stoppard’s new playLaughter in the dark