Best known to American audiences as the screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love, the celebrated British playwright Tom Stoppard was eighty-three when his most recent work premiered on London’s West End. Leopoldstadt tells the story of an extended Viennese Jewish family, and its members’ various Gentile spouses, during the first half of the 20th century. Jonathan Leaf reviews the play, which recently made its Broadway debut, praising it as a “remarkable drama.”
Leopoldstadt is a triumph of the playwriting art. It’s also a triumph of marketing. That’s because its advertising and publicity campaign has sold the public on the idea that it’s a multigenerational saga.
It is that, but only secondarily. To a much greater degree, it’s a ferociously angry Holocaust drama. . . . Although Leopoldstadt has moments of levity and even a brief bit of farce, it is darker and grimmer than past efforts to depict the Shoah such as Schindler’s List and Europa, Europa. Stoppard has said that he thinks the word play should convey the spirit of a stage presentation; a night at the theater ought to be fanciful and fun. But Leopoldstadt is as lighthearted as a sermon by Jonathan Edwards and as relaxed as a vacation to Putin’s Moscow.
The music foreshadows the dire fates due to befall but a few of those present. This hellishness will be visited not only upon the adults but also the children. One of these, fascinated as he is by soldiering, will die in the First World War. Another returns as a one-eyed amputee. Much worse, however, is to come, and in an epilogue set in 1955 we learn the despairing ends of those with whom we have just spent the past two-plus hours. In between, we see [one older family member] being humiliated by a scornful fin-de-siècle dragoon and Nazi officials forcing the various family members to kneel and beg that they may be permitted to go on a little longer before they are shipped off to Auschwitz in cattle cars.
The play’s title refers to Vienna’s old Jewish ghetto—Leopoldstadt—and the suggestion is that the ease and comfort its deracinated characters think they have attained outside it is illusory. They are no freer outside and in greater danger.
Read more on Acton Institute: https://blog.acton.org/archives/124019-tom-stoppards-leopoldstadt-is-a-work-of-bitter-greatness.html