Of the many questions Alan Yentob raises in Imagine’s new documentary profile of Tom Stoppard, one lingers unasked, yet permeates the whole; what makes someone a Jew? Family, history, faith? And what happens if all those elements have been removed from your life, is there anything that remains, some core quality that could then somehow be identified as being intrinsically Jewish?
Just the story alone of how Tomas Straussler became Tom Stoppard would be enough to make this a fascinating ninety minutes, a modern day Tarzan in reverse, a young child ship-wrecked from his own kind, growing to reach the pinnacle of his adopted society, even epitomising it. His family’s escape from the Nazis, their efforts to outrun the war in various outposts of the British Empire, their eventual settlement in the green and pleasant land of England with a new name, a new father, a new self; with another young writer that might’ve been their first play. Not so here, and for Alan Yentob and director Jill Nicholls, while they extricate the personal detail as we deftly zip through Tom Stoppard’s numerous works, they cleverly bring us full circle establishing connections and through lines to the themes that this person “not inclined to self- analysis and self-examination” finally explores in his latest work, himself.
Leopoldstadt, named after the Jewish Quarter in Vienna, is the result, covering the intergenerational fate of his family from the early 20th century onwards, with a proxy for Stoppard, one of the few survivors with a “charmed life”, appearing at the end. Why it’s taken so long, a lifetime, to get to this point, is down to the unaddressed trauma of his mother, who after having nearly all of her numerous siblings murdered, continued to live in fear of what being Jewish could mean. That silence about her past passed on to her son, as well as the means of dealing with emotional pain, where as he repeatedly states, “the gates come down.”
It’s only after her death that he could start truly exploring his background, and the revelation of his Jewishness is obviously something he’s been grappling with since. You couldn’t ask for someone better than Baroness Rabbi Julia Neuberger to assist him in that journey, and she’s the one who identifies the Jew that’s always been a part of who he is, the “back and forth” posturing of his rabbinical mind. This is a classy way of putting it, but as a later returnee myself, I can see what she’s really getting at. Essentially, we’re good at arguing.
Taken further, could this willingness to challenge, to explore that which is supposedly already known, from a new angle, be that intrinsic Jewish quality? It’s certainly what Stoppard has always brought to his work, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to Shakespeare In Love, but now that he’s unlocked a part of who he is, and from his emotional response to watching his latest work it sounds like that’s allowed him to finally pull up the gates, he’s also used his art to reconcile, and to heal.
