Stoppard returns to his roots

The octogenerian’s last play is more starkly emotional than usual and the ethics of spying are debated in a topical new work

- Michael Billington

EVEN before it opened at Wyndham’s, Sir Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt had the feel of an event: a final work from an 82-year-old dramatist who has enlarged the possibilities of theatre.

Having seen the play, I can only say that it fulfils one’s hopes in that it traces the fate of two Viennese Jewish families from 1899 to 1955 and leaves one deeply moved. I would only take issue with those critics who have suggested this is something new and unexpected from Sir Tom. For all his reputation as an intellectual gymnast, there has often been a strong emotional core—think of The Real Thing and Arcadia—to his work.

What makes Leopoldstadt exceptional is that it has echoes of the Czech-born Sir Tom’s own family history and that the emotion is much closer to the surface than usual. You see this particularly in three scenes. In the first, Hermann Merz, a textile manufacturer who argues ‘We’re Austrians now—Austrians of Jewish descent’, offers to fight a duel with an arrogant young dragoon who is his wife’s lover.

I was reminded of the plays of the great Austrian dramatist Schnitzler, in the way private pain encounters public prejudice. Adrian Scarborough brings out beautifully Hermann’s sexual anguish and Luke Thallon is all cold-blooded hauteur as the officer who claims that ‘since a Jew is devoid of honour from the day of his birth, it is impossible to insult a Jew’.