Tom Stoppard gets personal

Tom Stoppard’s most recent play, Leopoldstadt, opened at New York’s Longacre Theatre to effusive acclaim. The Czech-born British playwright is known for his verbal acuity, his elaborate narrative architecture, and his philosophical dexterity, first displayed in his breakout production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and confirmed in subsequent works such as Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974, winning the Tony Award for Best Play in 1976), The Real Thing (1982, another Tony award winner), Arcadia (1993), and his screenplay Shakespeare in Love (1998, cowritten with Marc Norman). In Leopoldstadt, these gifts are once again generously showcased—but this time the playwright appears to be grappling with both his family’s history and a deeply rooted fear about the direction of our society.

Stoppard’s new play is the 86-year-old’s most personal drama. In it, he recounts the saga of a Jewish family reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust. The story hinges on Stoppard’s own struggle to come to terms with a religious and ethnic heritage he has largely ignored during his career. Stoppard’s mother escaped the Nazi dragnet in Czechoslovakia and fled to India where she was married again—this time to a British officer. She then moved to England and established a new life in a household where the calamities of the past were stored in the attic alongside the Jewish customs of earlier generations. The young Stoppard found himself at home in a world of gentiles, and until now he has seemed happy to distract himself from the trauma into which his larger family was swept.

Leopoldstadt changes all of that. The opening scene unfolds in an elegant apartment where the Merz family, a highly cultured and religiously intermingled conglomerate, hustles and bustles to absorb the latest intellectual fashions, achieve economic success, and earn social acceptance. They are on the verge of the kind of full civic membership denied previous generations of Jews in Vienna. The year is 1899.