‘The arts are not an add-on’
Tom Stoppard, playwright
Much has been written about how long it has taken Tom Stoppard to have a public reckoning with his own Jewishness – but in fact Leopoldstadt had been incubating since 1999, when he wrote an article for Talk magazine. “I didn’t know where it would begin or end but I knew it would happen,” he says. “I also knew it was going to be heading for the final scene, which is where my personal history joins up with the fiction of the play.”
It is, he concedes, a unique addition to an oeuvre that stretches back to 1964 through some of the most performed and studied plays of the past century. And it has prompted an outpouring of thanks, confidences and self-penned memoirs from his Jewish audiences, all of which – “but don’t spread it around” – he answers personally from the Dorset cottage that he has only recently accepted as his primary residence.
At 82, he is full of the witty repartee that illuminates his plays – such as a story about Turgenev who, confronted by a man who insisted that a book about haemorrhoids was more valuable than Pushkin, retorted that the nonfiction tome made him remember his piles, while Pushkin enabled him to forget them.
Here, as ever, his humour has a serious purpose: “The arts,” he says, “whether it’s theatre or opera or circus or pantomime, are not an add-on, like restaurants: people are joined together by what Shakespeare called a mirror held up to nature. It’s a distorting mirror, which may be convex or concave or as flat as when you’re being measured for a suit, but when they’re in danger – as they are now – one begins to feel forlorn about picking up life where one left off, if we somehow fail to reassemble this essential part of a fulfilled life.”
Contrary to popular reports, he’s already thinking about the next play, though his working day now consists of one shift instead of two, and he’s easily distracted by periodicals. It’s hard to find a subject after the Holocaust, he says, mournfully. “It’s like saying I’m off to write a play about Winnie-the-Pooh.” Then he cheers up, remembering that “when I told Sonia I feared everything after this was going to look a bit frivolous, she immediately suggested I should try writing a two-hander comedy.” That would be one seriously elegant response to the West End’s life crisis. CA
‘I speak to my analyst online during the week’
Patrick Marber, director
As director, Patrick Marber’s role was largely played out long before the curtain came down on Leopoldstadt. He had been hoping to land the job of directing Tom Stoppard’s next play ever since his award-winning revival of Travesties in 2018. The 55-year-old writer-director has a Jewish background and an upbringing – in Marber’s case boarding school and Oxford – that set him, like Stoppard, at the heart of the establishment. “I felt we had a good relationship, and when he said his new play was set in Vienna and was looking at Jewish things I thought it could be me,” he says.
After months of being drip-fed scenes, the play arrived on his desk in April 2019, “and from that moment I was flat out on pre-production and working on the script and casting 43 actors. It was a vast labour of love. Designing it was complicated, and crewing it up. It was a relief when rehearsals started in early December.”
Its reception exceeded expectations. “Every performance was sold out and you don’t sell out without good word of mouth, but it’s a tough night at the theatre that leaves you feeling quite bleak. It throws a lot of information at you with huge time leaps. It’s Stoppard in full flight. But it’s what theatre should be: a participatory experience. We felt like a huge family. I’m devastated it’s off, but at least we got to perform it for seven weeks and there’s a chance of coming back.”
Lockdown poses no great problems for a polymath who admits his combi-life had left him behind with several scripts. He has lived in the same flat near Smithfield market in London since 1996. “The only difference is that when I moved in I was a single man, then my girlfriend, now wife (the actor Debra Gillett) arrived, followed by three children, two cats, two dogs and a tortoise.” He plays a lot of online poker (addiction to the game was the subject of his 1995 debut play, Dealer’s Choice), spends hours gardening on their roof terrace, and puts in three or four hours of writing a day in his office, which is immediately below the flat. He has just handed the BBC the first of his overdue projects: an adaptation of Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call, about a theatre critic in the 1930s, which, he says, could make a two-parter or a two-hour film.
Marber has spoken before about his struggles with depression, so how is he managing now? “I speak to my analyst online during the week, but I haven’t had a lockdown depression and I think I would have done if I hadn’t been able to.” His three boys, aged between 14 and 18, “have all been remarkably well-behaved. They go into their bedrooms and get taught and seem to be enjoying it. We’re very aware that we’re the lucky ones.” CA
‘I had to go on stage and tell 50 people to go home indefinitely’
Ros Brooke-Taylor, senior associate producer
In the final days before the show was pulled, Ros Brooke-Taylor spent much of her time at Wyndham’s because – as the producer tasked with managing the day-to-day running of Leopoldstadt – it was her job to make sure everyone felt safe. “Every time I walked into the building, people thought we were going to close,” she says - but when the day came it was still a shock. “I had to go on stage at 6pm, just as they were starting to warm up, and tell more than 50 people to go home indefinitely.” Among them were nine child actors and their chaperones. “People were visibly upset and one turned to me and said, ‘How am I going to pay my rent?’”
After rushing back to headquarters to update agents, investors, and two actors who had been stuck at home with fevers, before the news got out on social media, she returned to Covent Garden to find the streets eerily empty and the companies of Leopoldstadt and Uncle Vanya huddling together in a pub. “The feeling in the room was sadness and fear. Normally when you have all these people together it’s either opening night or the final performance and in both cases you’re thinking, ‘Thank God we made it here’. This time it was, ‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ – and not just the actors but all the support staff too.”
Brooke-Taylor is among the half of Friedman’s 40 core team who have not been furloughed, working from the kitchen of the London flat she shares with her husband and two teenage children – “trying to remember to switch the kettle on between Zoom calls”. For a while it looked as if theatres would reopen in June, but the date kept slipping, creating a new set of logistical challenges each time.
Then, on 12 April, her beloved uncle – the comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor – died with Covid-19. “My instant reaction was, ‘What can I do?’, but my cousin was really strong and said you’ve got to stay home. That was very hard for our family, along with thousands of others, as we haven’t been able to get together for the usual rituals.” In a sense, theatre itself is all about community and ritual, she points out. “We all miss it terribly. A live event is one that’s been around as long as we’ve had life.” CA
‘Working temporarily in a supermarket is fine but it’s not what I envisaged’
Lizzie Cooper, deputy stage manager
“It was a very strange brand of grief that I went through,” Lizzie Cooper says about the days that followed the closure. “We were in utter disbelief, and then it was like: we might not get to do the show again – and we were just getting into our stride.”
It was an exciting job for several reasons: a new Tom Stoppard play, a large company of actors to oversee – but also because Cooper, 29, had only recently risen to the position of deputy stage manager, working her way up from an assistant role over six years since completing a stage management MA at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
On Leopoldstadt, she worked with a close-knit stage team. “On a show day,” she explains, “we’d come in and set up all the props and the furniture. During the show, I’d stand in the wing and call all the technical cues – the lights and the sound, the scene changes, all the fly pieces [anything that’s lowered on to the stage from above], so that the show happens as you see it out front.”
Since it closed, Cooper has tried her best to keep busy. She’s “heavily involved” with the creative union Equity and has been part of conversations about reopening theatres. She found part-time work in a small supermarket in south-west London, where she lives, to prevent her savings from running out (she also claimed the self-employment grant) and to add some structure to her day. “Which is fine, but it’s never where I envisaged ending up,” she says. “I’ve poured a lot of time into this career. It’s a bit of a kick in the fanny, to be honest, not doing the job I love.” KF
‘These are the people you’ve broken bread with’
Alexis Zegerman, actor
“I write, so I can’t turn this into a sob story because I can always hustle for other work,” says Alexis Zegerman, whose “meaty” role as Eva involved ageing up over the course of the play from a young mother with a baby to a matriarch in her 70s – “with lots of lovely costumes and wigs”. It was her first stage performance in seven years and her first ever in the West End.
One of her contributions in the early days of rehearsals was to take along a photograph of her Jewish grandfather as a German officer in the first world war. “He had papers stamped by the Führer to say he was a war hero, but obviously that didn’t stop anything and the family got out in 1938 – so yes, it’s a very important story for me.”
Though she had the security of a contract to write a film for Sky, lockdown brought its own problems for a mother with children aged two and six. She and her journalist husband worked in different corners of the bedroom with the children tugging at the curtains, she jokes. For meetings she adopted her car as an office, sitting outside their home answering calls to the amusement of the neighbours. After a brief Covid-19 scare which involved driving to be swabbed at an army-run test centre in Hammersmith, her daughter is now back at school and she’s been able to return to her “little shared office”.
The company, meanwhile, has kept its morale up with a “Leopoldchat” WhatsApp group, meeting up for “birthday pile-ons” and dividing into their stage families for a remote pub quiz (“as the wife of Ludwig, played by Ed Stoppard, I was in team Jakobovicz”). She’s also part of a “dressing room” group of four actors, two of whom were already friends: she and Jenna Augen had acted together in a Royal Court production of Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley, while Dorothea Myer-Bennett was in Zegerman’s play Holy Sh!t, which reopened London’s Kiln theatre back in the halcyon days of 2018. “These are the people you’ve broken bread with and been nervous with every night before you go on,” she says of the dressing-room experience. “When you’re in a play together it’s like being in a family.” CA
‘We did a reading of a Stoppard play to keep connected’
Aaron Neil, actor
“We didn’t know it was the final night,” says Aaron Neil of Saturday’s evening performance. “The decision to close was made at about 5pm [on the Monday], and at 6pm we were called down to the stage where our producer gave an incredibly moving speech and burst into tears. Some people were already in corsets and thinking about getting in wigs. Afterwards we just went to the pub, slightly shell-shocked. We left stuff in our dressing rooms. The place is like the Mary Celeste.”
“I find myself looking at things every day that three or four months ago I thought could never happen.” The lockdown “feels inevitable only in retrospect”.
Neil was born in Manchester and grew up watching plays at the Royal Exchange. He studied at Cambridge and went on to work with the RSC and at the National Theatre, though in recent years he’s been getting more screen roles – he was one of the escaped convicts in Paddington 2 and has a regular part in the Channel 4 comedy series Home.
Now, with his career on hold, Neil is living a “quite solitary” existence in west London. “I don’t have a family here so I meditate, I do yoga. The cast did a reading of a Stoppard play together, to keep connected, which was really nice. For years I’ve thought, because I’ve been quite busy, wouldn’t it be nice to have some free time? And now I’ve got that free time, it’s under entirely the wrong circumstances – the sense of unfinished business makes it not enjoyable.”
He keeps thinking about the day the West End reopens. “When it comes back, it’ll come back with a bang.”
For now, though, he finds himself in a “strange kind of limbo”. “For years I’ve thought, because I’ve been quite busy, wouldn’t it be nice to have some free time? And now I’ve got that free time, it’s under entirely the wrong circumstances.” KF
‘Doing nothing is hard on your mental health’
Emma Sheppard, deputy head of wardrobe
“You’re constantly looking for your next job and worrying about how you’re going to make an income,” says Emma Sheppard, whose role involved prepping and maintaining all the costumes and helping the actors with quick changes and emergencies (ripped crotches, torn knees) during the show.
The 29-year-old, who grew up in Northumberland, got a job in the West End directly after graduating seven years ago and has worked on such starry productions as The Book of Mormon, Matilda and The Ferryman. But the precariousness of her position, like many others in the industry, has been put in sharp contrast by the pandemic. “Knowing that we were going to close early, and that it would have an impact on your income, was very stressful,” she says.
Thanks to her Bectu contract, Sheppard has been furloughed and is receiving payment under the job retention scheme, but her financial situation is challenging – as was the sudden collapse of her routine. “I’ve taken a couple of shifts at my local supermarket in south-east London, on the tills, just to keep my brain going more than anything else,” she says, “because going from long weeks to doing nothing is really difficult on your mental health.”
Sheppard’s partner also works in theatre – he’s a lighting technician – and many of her friends are in the industry, though she finds it painful to speak to other people in the same predicament. “You just get too upset with the reality. You hear rumours that we’re not going to be open until 2021.” KF
‘I do feel hope because I want to go to the theatre, to the pub’
Aimee Hulme, company manager
“It was, honestly, and I say this with absolute truth, one of the most incredible experiences,” says Aimee Hulme of working as company manager on Leopoldstadt. When she was approached to join the production last summer, the 32-year-old from Kent jumped at the chance. “I come from a Jewish background and it always feels extra special to work on something that has a personal connection. And, of course, to work on a new Tom Stoppard [play], I mean, who would say no to that?”
Hulme’s job is all-encompassing. “It means looking after everybody who works on the show, so the cast and all the technical departments. In addition to that, I’m working quite closely with the producers, as a stopgap between them and the production. Overall, I’m doing admin work, payroll, scheduling, things like that.”
She was doing up to 60 hours a week, so the contrast, when the work dropped off, was destabilising. “I feel like I’ve sort of got used to it now, but in the beginning it was really hard,” she says. “I’ve tried to maintain a bit of structure. One of the things that’s really helped is keeping my morning routine the same – getting up, showering and getting dressed, having coffee and breakfast and watching a bit of telly or reading a book. Which are small things, but they’ve felt really important.”
The delight she took from working on Leopoldstadt, and her sense of the play’s importance, made the closure particularly wrenching. “I found that really hard, the thought that lots of people wouldn’t get to see it,” she says. But Hulme remains optimistic about the future of her trade. “I think people will want to go out and experience things that they maybe didn’t experience before, and I think theatre will be a massive part of that. I do feel hope,” she adds, “partly because I want to do those things myself: to go to the theatre and eat in a restaurant and go to the pub. If I feel like that, then I think lots of other people will too.” KF
