In the final scene of Tom Stoppard’s latest play, Leopoldstadt, which follows generations of a Jewish family living in Vienna from the late 1800s through World War II and its aftermath, a stand-in for the playwright himself makes an appearance.
The character, named Leo, fled Vienna during the war as a child, and now, in 1955, returns to the city as a proud 24-year-old Englishman, with an anglicized name, and with few memories of his time in the city and of his Jewish heritage. He reunites with long-lost relatives, who force him to confront the truth of what happened to his family during the war.
“No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you,” says his cousin, Nathan.
Tom Stoppard
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While some details are changed, this plotline closely mirrors Stoppard’s own story. The playwright, who was born Tomás Straüssler in Czechoslovakia, later moved to England and took on the name Tom Stoppard. It was only later in life that Stoppard learned he was Jewish and that his grandparents had been killed in the Holocaust.
The Travesties and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead playwright and screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love says he rarely puts himself into his own work, but, at this point in his career, he felt that the time was right to address this story.
“Because of the age I got to, I was born in 1937, it just felt like time that I dealt with my family’s history,” Stoppard tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Leopoldstadt began its run in London’s West End before transferring to Broadway in the fall of 2022. The play, which features a cast of about 30 actors portraying different family members across the generations, was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play, in addition to five other nominations. Stoppard calls the recognition “a great compliment,” and one that’s encouraging him to write another play.
“It doesn’t make me think, “Oh, I can stop now. Terrific. Hooray.” It makes me think, “Oh, I really should pull myself together and get to work,” he says.
Stoppard speaks with THR about seeing elements of his personal history on stage, what inspired him to write the piece and his plans for more.
I know that this piece is semi-autobiographical for you. Can you talk about your relationship to this story?
Well, I’m not a very autobiographical writer. And this play’s very close to being partly autobiographical. I come from a family not completely unlike the family in the play, but in fact, I’m Czech, and I chose to write about a Viennese family.
My own personal history couldn’t be more different until you get to the last scene of the play, when, to my surprise more than anybody’s, I almost make a personal appearance in it. And so it does mean more than any of my other plays in that way. There’s a young English guy in the last scene, and he says things I’ve thought for a long time.
How does it feel, seeing something that has that personal connection to you performed on a stage?
To some degree, I guess it felt very personal, that part of the play, but at the same time, you’ll never stop looking at it objectively, as a piece of work that you made, and as ever, you’re trying to make that work as good as you can. So you’re still looking at it in quite a beady-eyed way, saying “Is this how it should be?”
And having said that, in a weird way, that final scene, to use a very, very old cliché, is one of the scenes which almost wrote itself.
I do have a very particular regard or relationship with Leopoldstadt. As I said earlier, I didn’t use what I know about my own family, some of whom perished in the same appalling way. But maybe writing about it in a way which is close to reality gives one the same sense of participation in the play itself.
What inspired you to write this play?
When the play was being written, it wasn’t as though I was writing it now. People weren’t talking about antisemitism in the way that they are nowadays. Things have changed in the last three years or more, and I wasn’t writing it as a response to antisemitism becoming a headline at that time.
Because of the age I got to, I was born in 1937, it just felt like time that I dealt with my family’s history. But at the same time, I could also say that it arrived in my mind as something I had an instinctive interest in doing. I’d never before thought of my family history, or my own history, as being an inspiration for a play. I’d never remotely come close to writing a play, just by my own personal history, of being connected to, in a negative way, the most important event in European history in the 20th century.
I was reading an interview in which you were saying that the business model for this play, which features many actors, was “insanity.” What do you think about the state of the Broadway business model?
The expense of mounting a play in New York has escalated. And life is harder for theaters. It’s not something which has happened only to the theater business; it’s happened to all sorts of things. But in the case of this claim, what I said about it being an absurd business model was that I didn’t know anybody except [producer] Sonia Friedman, who would encourage me to write a play with as many actors as I wanted without taking that into consideration. Now I think that moment has passed. And I think that we’re in a world where a play with three characters, maybe four would be considered a desirable business model. It’s not just actors; everything about mounting a play has become a bit extreme financially. I’m not a producer and I’d hate to be one, but I’ve had a ringside view.
I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to see a play with 26 actors and several child actors actually being performed. But here we are. I don’t think it’s gonna happen again for me.
What does this Tony Award nomination mean to you?
It means a kind of acknowledgment from the world of New York theater. And it’s a great compliment, and it’s very encouraging. It doesn’t make me think, “Oh, I can stop now. Terrific. Hooray.” It makes me think, “Oh, I really should pull myself together and get to work.”
Can we expect more plays from you then?
Until quite recently, I didn’t seem to have anything to inspire me to do another play. But at the moment, and, I may feel differently tomorrow, I feel that I’m getting into something new.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
