VIENNA — Leopoldstadt is the name of a central Viennese district with a large Jewish population. It’s also the title of Tom Stoppard’s 2020 Olivier Award-winning play, which opened in the West End shortly before the start of the pandemic.
Two and a half years after its London premiere, ‘Leopoldstadt’, a multi-generational saga about the triumphs and tragedies of an Austrian-Jewish family in the first half of the 20th century, has arrived in Vienna, where this spring its German-speaking premiered. at the Theater in der Josefstadt in a clever and effectively traditional staging by Janusz Kica. (It will return to the repertory in December. The London production will move to Broadway in the fall, where it will run at the Longacre Theatre.)
It’s a fitting irony that none of the “Leopoldstadt” actually takes place in Leopoldstadt, as many of its characters try – and fail – to escape the perceived stigma of being Jewish by reinventing themselves as Austrians.
Seeing ‘Leopoldstadt’ in London, I wondered how the Viennese public would react to Stoppard’s fictional exploration of their history and culture. I was especially curious if his recreation of the culturally oversaturated fin de siècle Vienna, a vanished world that continues to fascinate, would convince an audience more familiar with that glittering era. Especially in the first half, around 1900, Stoppard wears his scholarship and erudition on his sleeve; at times, the amount of historical and cultural detail that crisscross the dialogue threatens to derail the play, with its nearly 30 characters and unusually gnarled structure.
The closest Stoppard gives us to a conventional protagonist is Hermann Merz, a prosperous textile manufacturer who has largely shaken off the traditions of his ungainly ancestors and entered high society. The Merz clan is a motley crew that celebrates Christmas and Passover with both taste and irreverence. Baptized and married to a Catholic woman, Hermann nevertheless boasts of the enormous contribution of the Jews to culture, without which “Austria would be the Patagonia of banking, science, law, the arts, literature and journalism” , he says.
As I listened to Adrian Scarborough, who played Hermann in the London production, recite Hermann’s triumphalist speeches with roars, I cringed a little. Yet the lines sounded considerably less forced in the mouth of Herbert Föttinger, who played the character in Vienna, and in a faithful and fluent translation by German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. It is largely a matter of temperament. Scarborough played Hermann as a nouveau riche climber who is both haughty and insecure, while Föttinger portrayed him as gentle and self-righteous. We believe him when he approvingly remarked that Vienna’s middle-class Jews “literally worship the culture.”
Föttinger’s elegance and poise at the beginning of the piece helped make Hermann’s subsequent humiliations and his eventual demise all the more tragic. When an Austrian officer who was having an affair with Hermann’s wife, Gretl, refused a duel with Hermann on the grounds that a Jew was born without honor and therefore cannot claim reparation for an insult, we understood that this offense meant more to Hermann. wounded his wife’s infidelity.
Hermann Metz embodies the worldview of a confident minority who had found acceptance and success in a culture that was an artistic, intellectual, scientific and political hotbed. (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Arthur Schnitzler have all been named.) Stoppard’s way of evoking the milieu of assimilated Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire owes much to writers of the period, including Schnitzler and Stefan. Zweig, whose posthumously published memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” is perhaps the most evocative and nostalgia-infused chronicle of the era.
“Leopoldstadt” jumps from the early 20th century to the years after World War I and from there to the Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom the Nazis staged across the Third Reich on November 9, 1938. we visit characters last seen decades earlier – as well as some newcomers – in radically altered historical contexts.
In the second half, “Leopoldstadt” is in doubt only once. In a scene set in 1924, the family members discuss the Great War, the breakup of Austria in its aftermath, and the messy politics and competing ideologies of the interwar period. In London, I felt like the scene was just struggling to dramatize the themes; here it felt more awkward, and even unnecessary, as if Stoppard was teaching the Viennese about their own history.
Stoppard’s masterful closing scene, in which the three surviving members of the Merz family reunite in 1950s Vienna, was delicately directed and acted, but many of the revelations were less convincing in German than in English.
One of the family members, Leo, grew up in England and, crucially, has no memory of his early life in Vienna. (So it’s hard to imagine him speaking perfect German without an accent.) Now that he’s a young man, he’s a writer of some renown. In a painful reunion with his cousins—a New York psychoanalyst and a Holocaust-survivor mathematician—long-suppressed memories are brought to the surface, and the past intrudes on the present in unexpected and haunting ways.
Remarkably, “Leopoldstadt” is not the only recent British play with Austrian roots that this season to Vienna. Earlier in the year, the Burgtheater hosted the German-language premiere of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s 2019 rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” which was first seen at the Almeida, the London playhouse Icke used to run.
Schnitzler’s play, first performed in 1912, is an indictment of Austrian anti-Semitism that Hermann Merz so naively sees as a thing of the past. The most notable change that Icke, who also directed the production, makes to his version is a gender reassignment that is central to his reinvention and updating of the piece.
Like Schnitzler’s spiky male protagonist, Dr. Ruth Wolff (Sophie von Kessel in a feat) is attacked for refusing to grant a priest final rights to a delirious patient who doesn’t know her end is near. In the original, Professor Bernhardi becomes the target of an anti-Semitic media campaign. In Icke’s retelling, Dr. Wolff has been the victim of virulent social media attacks that are more like misogyny.
She defends herself against the anonymous online mafia by appearing on television to debate a hypocritical awakened panel. All of this gives Icke ample opportunity to scrap culture, identity politics, and political correctness, though the satirical and the heartfelt often coexist uncomfortably, especially when his supporting characters are annoyingly moralizing. At the same time, the color-blind and ‘gender-blind’ casting challenges the audience to look beyond race and gender and reflect impartially on the moral conundrums of the play.
As with Stoppard and ‘Leopoldstadt’, ‘The Doctor’ feels like a kind of homecoming: a Viennese return for a contemporary play that has its origins in the world of yesterday.
Leopoldstadt† directed by Janusz Kica† Theater in der Josefstadt.
that rztin† Directed by Robert Icke† Burgtheater Wien, until 13 June.