Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstat: Theater review
’s long stage and screen career, is an intimate epic. It springs to astonishing dramatic life in a now bare, but once glorious apartment off Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1955. The only problem is, for all the visceral emotional intensity of that scene, it forms less than the last quarter of a play that begins, two hours earlier, at the same address in 1899.
Despite the religious divide, the atmosphere is harmonious, as amusingly symbolized by the moment where Hermann and Gretel’s young son places a star at the top of the traditional tree: a Star of David. As his shrugging grandmother exclaims, “Poor boy, baptized and circumcised in the same week, what can you expect?”In a recurring attempt, not always successful, to clarify how everyone fits into the family, Stoppard ensures everyone repeatedly uses one another’s names.
But then — with the notable exception of a succession of early, two-actor scenes covering Gretl’s affair and its unexpected repercussions — the play’s focus is generational, not individual. Stoppard is presenting and explicating a succession of dwindling family portraits as antisemitism outside rises inexorably to take a firmer grip. Vital though this survey of history is, it cannot be denied that the play is static.
From there, Stoppard moves to the final scene in which two family members who survived the war meet Leonard, the easeful, thoroughly Anglicized son of one of the children from the opening scene, whose mother survived the war having escaped to England. At last, the debates about Jewish identity have fiercely emotional resonance since we have witnessed, at least in part, the people being spoken of whose lives have been taken.
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