Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt and Its Discontents

Abstract

Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt and Its Discontents Martin Schneider Late last year I attended the New York production of Tom Stoppard's latest play, Leopoldstadt, at the Longacre Theatre. The play's original run was in London's West End in early 2020 before being interrupted by COVID. It is said that it will be the final play of his storied career. I have been the copyeditor of The Journal of Austrian Studies for more than 10 years and am the descendant of Viennese Jews, so naturally my ears perked up when I first heard the title some months earlier. For me, the performance was unusual in that it so strikingly resembled an article of JAS come to life. Hofmannsthal, Herzl, "Handsome/Schöne" Karl Lueger, Anschluss, 2. Republik—it's all there. In this brief essay I address the content of the play and discuss Stoppard's literary ties to Vienna and Austria-Hungary, an aspect of his life and career of which some of his fans might be unaware. I wish I could say that the play was an unmitigated success. The play shows all the hallmarks of Stoppard's career, that is to say, wide erudition, wit, complexity, and an appetite for ideas. Stoppard is a favorite playwright of mine, but his output since 2000 has struck me, for the most part, as not fit material for the stage, lacking the capacity to delight, astound, and move a normal audience. A characteristic story, told by the British critic Michael Billington: "I have an indelible memory of meeting Stoppard on the steps of the London Library laden with books some time before Jumpers opened. 'What have you got there?' I innocently asked. 'My next play,' he crisply replied" (82). For the Stoppard enthusiast, the exchange is haunting because it confronts what one [End Page 91] might term Stoppard's signature weakness, an intermittent inability to create a play that delivers the effects that every play must. To Stoppard's credit, it seems, he knows that his plays have a bookish cast—they could often be footnoted—and he is able to poke fun at himself. For the Stoppard aficionado, it is basic information that he was born Tomáš Sträussler before the war (1937) in what was then Czechoslovakia; the locality was Zlín. The young Sträussler's perambulations were complex and varied, featuring stays in Singapore and India. At some point before the war his father perished in eastern Asia. By the time World War II had come to an end, his mother had married a British officer named Stoppard. The new stepfather, a devout patriot, impressed upon young "Tom" that English citizenship was the most fortunate fate that could befall a person, an ethic the child seems to have gratefully imbibed (Lee 5–30). Mixed in with this was some degree of sheepish, perhaps semiconscious guilt over his own survival when his own father had not lived to see the end of the war. His early adult years were a time of considerable political tumult; when leftism among creative British persons was taken for granted, Stoppard struck a different, aloof note. The year that Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, Stoppard, at the age of 42, called himself "a conservative with a small c. I'm a conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" (Nadel 297). This profile of the "conservative" and perhaps even "apolitical" playwright has haunted Stoppard's career, but the pose he struck as a younger man was not cast in amber, as we shall see. Stoppard's first major splash as a playwright came in 1966, with the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant nugget of Ionesco- and Beckett-influenced absurdism using the nooks and crannies of Shakespeare's Hamlet to offer the audience a pleasing assortment of circuitous and self-referential japes and witticisms. Between 1979 and 1986, Stoppard, now a thoroughly established playwright, occupied himself with free adaptations of Habsburgian plays. The list of Viennese works Stoppard adapted runs as follows: Undiscovered Country (1979), adapting Arthur Schnitzler's 1910 play Das Weite Land On the Razzle (1981), adapting Johann Nestroy's 1842 play Einen Jux will er...