Tom Stoppard

by Kirk Woodward

[On 22 October, I posted “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” on Rick On Theater.  It’s an assemblage of different pieces about the playwright, including a short biographical sketch.  As an introduction to the post, I gave a little background of my initiation to Stoppard’s work.  Here’s an edited version of that introduction:

[Tom Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights; since I first encountered his work some fifty-odd years ago, I have reveled in his wordplay and his convoluted logic and intellectualism.  I first experienced Stoppard’s work while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  I attended several plays at the five-year-old Actors Theatre of Louisville, just 45 minutes north of the army base.

[Louisville, as it happens, is the hometown of Kirk Woodward, my college classmate and the author of the report on Hermione Lee’s new biography of the dramatist.

[I saw three plays at ATL, the third of which knocked me out because I’d never before seen anything like it: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  The deconstruction of Hamlet, the verbal play, the twisty logic, the philosophical underpinning, the fundamental question of how we know what we (think we) know, all made my mind spin and my mouth gape.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately became one of my top favorite plays. 

[I’ve seen many of Stoppard’s plays since then.  I did one of my first acting-class scenes from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Later I played Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and I used a speech from Jumpers as an audition piece for a number of years.  I haven’t caught all of them, but many of the plays listed below have been part of my theater experience.]

Tom Stoppard: A Life. Lee, Hermione. 2022. Vintage Books, New York. 872 pp.

I saw the play Leopoldstadt on Broadway in New York City on December 1, 2022, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. I went to see it because a family friend, Brandon Uranowitz (b. 1986), a three-time nominee for the Tony Award, plays two prominent roles in the play. I was not disappointed; his performance is stunning.

But so is the entire play, and it has been on my mind ever since. In scope and in impact, it is powerful. It was written by Tom Stoppard (b. 1937). I have always thought of him as one of the younger generation of playwrights; it came as something of a shock to realize that he is now 85. Clearly I needed to learn more about him, so I bought Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee.

The most striking aspect of the book description above may be the 872 pages. If you’ve had an ambition to meet Tom Stoppard, you might want to read this book instead. It would take you about as long as it would to fly to England, and by the end of the book you’d feel you’d known him personally.

Hermione Lee (b. 1948), noted for biographies of the novelists Willa Cather (published in 1989) and Virginia Woolf (published in 1996), was asked by Stoppard to write this biography, which follows an earlier one with the same title by Ira Bruce Nadel (b. 1943), published in 2002 and credited by Lee as “thoroughly researched [and] detailed.”

Those words certainly apply to Lee’s book. Stoppard invited her to write it; he told friends to cooperate with her, and he made a staggering amount of documentation available to her. The result is highly readable – a triumph for the author, and a tribute to the enormous activity with which Stoppard has filled his life. I found it difficult to read anything else until I had finished it.

Lee peppers her book with references to Stoppard’s skeptical attitude toward biography. She writes:

There have been moments when he clearly regretted setting this book in motion, and would have preferred me not to be asking personal questions about him of his friends, or reading his archive, or asking him about his past. For all that he is a public and highly visible personage, he is also a reserved, shy and embarrassable private man, protective of himself and of his family. Sometimes he has been baffled by the whole process and by the questions I’ve asked him. This can’t be any use to you, can it? he has often asked, in mid-conversation.

Lee’s biography is “critical” in the sense that it takes a thorough look at Stoppard’s writing. It is hardly critical of him as a person, although it acknowledges contradictory and sometimes difficult elements of his personality:

One young playwright, who adores him but has witnessed him in critical mode, added to his adjectives [describing Stoppard]: “And a tiny bit evil.” One grand old woman of the world, an old friend of his, said to me: “Beware of the charm.” A theatre director noted that he used his politeness to get what he wanted from people. A woman who has often worked with him notes that he is not influenced by anyone when he wants something his way. “Solitary” and “private” are frequent adjectives. Many people who know him have said they don’t feel they know him well. They don’t know who his close friends are and they aren’t even sure if he has any.

I quote this passage at length because it’s pretty much the worst anybody has to say about him. Lee often puts the best construction on his behavior; on the other hand, in the strenuous world of the theater few people are saints, and Stoppard’s dealings with people appear to be honest and aboveboard.

Certainly Lee gives him the benefit of the doubt when she can. Of his breakup with the splendid performer Felicity Kendal (b. 1946), for example, Lee writes that

Though she keeps the private story of their life to herself, she speaks of him to this day with fondness, humour and respect. If there was pain and sadness, it was well managed, and outweighed by affection and loyalty. It is one of the striking features of his life that he has stayed friends with his ex-partners.

The facts, as far as they can be known, seem likely to be true (although it took time for Stoppard and his first wife to reestablish an equilibrium after their divorce), but it certainly is not tabloid-style journalism.

Two other aspects of Lee’s writing to note: she occasionally uses British slang that might not be familiar to Americans (but, after all, she’s British); and if she uses the word “he” without a clear antecedent, as she frequently does, it refers to Stoppard.

I have seen little of Stoppard’s work and read little more; Lee’s book convinced me that I have missed a great deal in two ways: she convinces me that his work has great value, and that there is a huge amount of it. Stoppard seems to have been a non-stop (if I may put it that way) writer.

His plays are certainly his best-known output, and he has said that he’s “a theater writer who does other things.” Indeed he does – essays, letters, journals, speeches, media appearances, radio and TV dramas, nearly everything except social media (which he avoids).

I was astounded by the number of movies he’s been associated with, whether he was credited or not: examples include Brazil (1985), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, in my opinion the best of that series), The Russia House (1990), Shakespeare in Love (1998, his project from inception and a Best Picture Oscar and Golden Globe Award winner for him and his co-author Marc Norman), and Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). By any account, that’s a wide variety of films, and it’s just a sampling.

But, as Lee says, “Stoppard was, after all, a playwright, not a historian, a biographer, an essayist or a philosopher – though he feeds off all those genres.” “Feed off” he does – he is an astonishing researcher. Lee says

His process was always the same. He read and read till he had taken on more than he could handle. Then he plunged in and made it up as he went along. There had to be a point where he stopped beating himself up for not knowing X, Y, and Z, and began writing without knowing X, Y, and Z. It was a lesson he had found hard to learn.

What does he research? The answer is “just about anything,” which can include topics from history, science, philosophy, mathematics, religion. His play Travesties (1974) is a good example.

The initial idea came from a not then published novel which mentioned that Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state (1870-1924); the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961); the novelist James Joyce (1882-1941); and Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), an influential literary figure of his time and an important figure in the Dadaist and Symbolist movements, were all in Zurich, Switzerland, at the same time in 1916.

If the name of Tzara is unfamiliar, in a way that’s the point: Stoppard has exhaustively researched the period, its events, characters, and themes, and created a celebrated play out of a mix of elements some of which are almost certainly not common knowledge. This has given him a reputation as a playwright more interested in the intellect than in human behavior – an opinion that can be challenged, as we will see below.

Still, although Lee doesn’t make the following point, it seems to me easy to see Stoppard as a playwright descended, not directly, from another playwright often accused of over-intellectualism, namely George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

There are resemblances: both Shaw and Stoppard came to England from other countries (Shaw from Ireland, Stoppard from Czechoslovakia); both began their careers in journalism; both wrote prolifically and startled their audiences by the emphasis they put on intellectual activity.

And both were involved in social movements of their times. Shaw had numerous theories on how economies and governments should be organized – he was among other things a fervent Socialist. Stoppard has focused on freedom of expression, particularly in nations like Czechoslovakia when the U.S.S.R. controlled Eastern Europe.

Both in fact could be labeled as playwrights of a “theater of ideas,” but that label would get us almost nowhere. There are ideas of all sorts; the question is what they mean to people who use ideas as a way of explaining themselves, the world, and what’s important to them.

Stoppard is certainly known for esoteric choices of material in his plays. Lee makes a good case, however, that human relationships are at the core of the plays, and that “all this material had to be turned into a drama that would make people laugh and weep, as well as think.”

She describes how Stoppard’s son Ed, viewing his work, came to ”see that the actors needed to find the key to it – as often in his father’s plays – through the emotions, not the ‘cerebral’ side.” When asked how the actors should approach his play Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), a play about the role music played in the opposition to the Communist government in Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard said, “Tell them it’s a love story.”

Stoppard describes his approach to writing plays in similar non-scientific terms – he researches like crazy, then plunges into writing the play. “If you can steel yourself just to blunder off into the dark, and keep alert to the way it might go, then God will come to your aid.” (He is not conventionally religious, which makes his choice of words particularly interesting here.)

Shaw, like Stoppard, was accused of writing plays that are “all talk.” Their styles, though, are different; Shaw tends to focus on one subject per play (on which he is thoroughly informed, at least in his own opinion), while Stoppard enjoys creating a mix.

Writing his play Saint Joan (1923), Shaw read most of the major accounts of Joan’s of Arc’s life (c. 1412-1431), and carefully studied (and used) the transcripts of her trial. That amount of research was sufficient for his purposes. Had Stoppard written the play, one can imagine his bringing in astronomy, quantum physics, and numerology as well. If he had, no one would have been surprised.

But although abstract thought may take a role in Stoppard’s work, there is a definite personal side to it, as Lee makes clear – a fact never more evident than in Leopoldstadt (first performed in London in 2020, where it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play that year). The story behind the story is fairly well known by now: Stoppard’s family was Jewish, but he was only dimly conscious of that fact until the 1990’s (see “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” – especially “Brief Biography”).

His family were Czech Jews, and when the Nazis arrived, some escaped, most did not; all his grandparents died in concentration camps. Stoppard situates the play’s story in Vienna rather than in Prague, but he dramatizes the same drift in Austria from casually insulting anti-Semitism to the brutal onslaught of the Germans, with the same results as his family experienced.

The last of the five scenes in the play shows a character very much like Stoppard – urbane, British in manner and outlook – coming face to face with the facts of his heritage. The scene is sobering and affecting. The preceding scene, in which the Nazis invade the family residence, is terrifying and I still have not gotten over it.

There is a great deal more to Lee’s book than I have described here, of course, including fascinating details like his expectations of actors (frequently, what he insists on is good diction) and his way of working with directors (open to their suggestions, but stubborn about what he wants).

Is Stoppard a great playwright? Asked the question, he replied with animation that it was too soon to tell. One thing is certain: Stoppard has greatly expanded the assumed limits of what a play can successfully do, by bringing in elements of the complexity of life that previously had not found much of a place in theater.

He has done this with both imagination and intelligence, not sacrificing the importance of plot and the complexity of human relationships. His plays answer the question, “Should theater entertain or educate?” by demonstrating that life is complex – more complex than the question itself.

*  *  *  *

[I was listening to the local CBS news on 21 November last, and its occasional “Broadway and Beyond” segment was on Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.  Brandon Uranowitz, who plays a Stoppard-like character in the autobiographically inspired play, was featured in an interview with the correspondent Dick Brennan.  Uranowitz, who was the principal spokesperson on the segment (other than Brennan) spoke about the play and anti-Semitism—past and present.  (As Kirk notes above, Uranowitz is a “family friend.”  The video is available at “Leopoldstadt” star Brandon Uranowitz reflects on new Broadway play's important and timely story - CBS New York (cbsnews.com)).]

“‘LEOPOLDSTADT’ STAR BRANDON URANOWITZ REFLECTS ON
NEW BROADWAY PLAY’S IMPORTANT AND TIMELY STORY”
by Dick Brennan 

NEW YORK -- The new Broadway play “Leopoldstadt” shows the horror and heartbreak an extended Jewish family faces when the Nazis occupy Austria during World War II.

Actor Brandon Uranowitz sat down with CBS2’s Dick Brennan to talk about the rise of antisemitism on stage and what’s happening today.

It is a searing family drama of love, tragedy and human suffering sprawled over decades. The play follows an Austrian-Jewish family through the joy and prosperity of the turn of the 20th century and then into the darkness of Kristallnacht [“The Night of Broken Glass,” 9-10 November 1938] and the scourge of Nazism.

It is in part based on the life of Tom Stoppard, one of the most successful playwrights in Broadway history, and features a giant cast [38 actors] portraying a family tree that withers under the burden of hatred and oppression.

“I think if you’ve never experienced what it’s like to be oppressed or be marginalized, it can be very difficult to step into the shoes of someone who has,” Uranowitz said.

Uranowitz takes on two roles, Ludwig and Nathan, over a five-decade period from 1899 to 1955.

“There’s a very terrifying parallel between that apartment and this theater, and everything that’s happening outside of it,” he said.

Today’s headlines prove that antisemitism never really goes away.

“‘Leopoldstadt’ is sort of bringing to life the kind of Holocaust education in a pop culture sense,” said Scott Richman, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League.

Richman says the play sends an important signal to society at precisely the right time.

“I’m really glad that a show like this, which has a message about the Holocaust and where hate can lead . . . is a very important message,” he said.

Generally what awaits Uranowitz outside the theater is adoration from people who may have experienced what they just saw or who’ve had family who did, and he says they become an important part of the play itself.

“Any time I’m rehearsing a play, it always comes up that like, well, we’ve gone as far as we can, until we introduce the last character, which is the audience. And it does feed their performance, it uplifts their performance, and it validates their performance,” Uranowitz said.

“If there was some one thing, one theme . . . that is a message of this play and that perhaps might resonate beyond the doors here. . .” Brennan said.

“For me, the biggest thing about the play is memory and remembering,” Uranowitz said. “I think my biggest hope for this play is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum or it doesn’t exist in an echo chamber. I don’t want the themes of this play, to just be presented to people who already understand them and know them.”

Uranowitz is a three-time Tony nominee who has worked in film and TV, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” so what keeps him returning to the theater?

“Theater to me is just, it’s my life blood because there’s nothing else like it in the world. And you know, when you do film and TV, you sort of jump into the middle of a scene, you jump into the middle of an ‘act,’ and in theater, you start at the beginning and you go through the middle and you go to the end, and you experience something in real time with people and then it’s done. And there’s something ethereal about it. And yes, we do it eight times a week, yes, it’s repetitive, I guess, but every single performance is entirely unique because everyone here [in the audience] is different. What we’re bringing into the theater every day is different and that informs how we talk and listen and react. Theater to me is the greatest thing on Earth because there’s nothing else like it, and we all experience this one thing together and then it disappears,” he said.

“Leopoldstadt” is running at the Longacre Theatre through March 2023.

[Dick Brennan joined CBS2 (WCBS, channel 2 in New York City) in 2012 as an anchor and reporter. In addition, he anchors on the digital channel CBS News New York, which is also seen on the News at Nine on WCBS’s Long Island sister station WLNY-TV (channel 55 in Riverhead, Suffolk County, New York).

[Brandon Uranowitz, a stage and screen actor, is from Livingston, New Jersey, and turned 36 last July.  Growing up in West Orange, New Jersey, he began performing at age six.  By the mid-’90s, he was appearing professionally in regional and Off-Broadway New York City productions.

[Uranowitz graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2008 with a degree in theater arts and made his Broadway debut in the 2011 jukebox musical Baby It’s You! (pop and rock hits of the 1960s), which ran for 33 previews and 148 regular performances.

[He’s best known for his roles as Adam Hochberg in the musical An American in Paris (2014-15; see reports on ROT by me and Kirk Woodward, posted respectively on 2 August 2015 and 13 November 2015) and Mendel Weisenbachfeld in the 2016 Broadway revival of Falsettos (see Kirk’s report on 5 January 2017).

[A three-time Tony Award nominee, Uranowitz received nominations for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for those performances in addition to a 2019 nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Burn This.  His other Broadway credits include Prince of Broadway (2017) and The Band’s Visit (2018). 

[I first saw Uranowitz on stage in Washington, D.C., doing Arnold in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (see “Torch Song Trilogy,” 5 October 2013.)  He was nominated for the Helen Hayes Award—the D.C.-area regional counterpart of the Tony—for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Resident Play.]

Tom Stoppard & 'Leopoldstadt'

 

[Tom Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights; since I first encountered his work some fifty-odd years ago, I have reveled in his wordplay and his convoluted logic and intellectualism.  I was delighted when I was watching the PBS NewsHour as usual earlier this month and anchor Judy Woodruff announced a segment on Stoppard and his new play, Leopoldstadt.  I knew at once that I would download the transcript to post on Rick On Theater.

[I first experienced Stoppard’s work sometime between December 1969 and February 1970, while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  I attended several plays at the five-year-old Actors Theatre of Louisville, just 45 minutes north of the army base along U.S. Route 31W, known as the “Dixie Dieway.”  This was my first encounter with ATL, now one of this country’s premier regional theater companies.

[I saw at least three plays at ATL, then located in the former Illinois Central Railway Station before moving to its present location in 1972.  One was a Hamlet, which suffered an electrical mishap near the start of the performance and had to do the rest of the show under house lights. 

[Another production was Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by newly appointed artistic director Jon Jory and featuring his parents, famous movie actor Victor Jory as Big Daddy and Jean Inness as Big Mama.  This was when I learned that Cat had two endings because director Elia Kazan made Williams change his original last act for the Broadway première in 1955.  (The Elizabeth Taylor-Paul Newman film of 1958 used the second version; Jory staged Williams’s first ending.)

[The third play I saw at ATL knocked me out because I’d never before seen anything like it: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  The deconstruction of Hamlet, the verbal play, the twisty logic, the philosophical underpinning, the fundamental question of how we know what we (think we) know, all made my mind spin and my mouth gape.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately became one of my top favorite plays. 

[I’ve seen many of Stoppard’s plays since then.  I did one of my first acting-class scenes from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Later I played Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and I used a speech from Jumpers as an audition piece for a number of years.  I haven’t caught all of them, but many of the plays listed below have been part of my theater experience.]

“PLAYWRIGHT TOM STOPPARD GRAPPLES WITH HIS HIDDEN PAST IN LATEST WORK”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[This is the transcript of correspondent Jeffrey Brown’s interview with British playwright Tom Stoppard from the PBS NewsHour broadcast on 17 October 2022.  Following this, I’ve posted a short biographical sketch of the Czech-born dramatist with a run-down of his writings, and then a review from the New Yorker of Stoppard’s current Broadway offering, Leopoldstadt, which is the topic of the NewsHour interview.]

In a new Broadway play, one of the world’s greatest writers, grapples with his own hidden past and its implications for our time. Sir Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” chronicles a family history he only learned about in his 50s when a relative told him that all four of his Jewish grandparents had been murdered by the Nazis. Jeffrey Brown talks to Stoppard for our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Judy Woodruff: In a new Broadway play, one of the world’s greatest writers grapples with his own hidden past and its implications for our time.

Jeffrey Brown talks with playwright Sir Tom Stoppard for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): You are not looking.

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown: The year is 1899, Vienna.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): It is a beautiful star, darling, but it’s not the star we put at the top of our Christmas tree.

Jeffrey Brown: The members of the Merz clan, an assimilated Jewish family in which a confused grandchild can put a Star of David atop a Christmas tree, feel themselves full members of our highly cultured Viennese society and Austro-Hungarian empire.

Over the coming years and generations, they will learn how wrong they are.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): To a Gentile, I am a Jew. There isn’t a Gentile anywhere who at one moment or another hasn’t thought, “Jew.”

Jeffrey Brown: Nearly every family member we meet in the play “Leopoldstadt” will be killed or die as a result of the Holocaust.

It’s a devastating story of a family tree cut down, one that’s impacting audiences and playwright Tom Stoppard himself in ways he hadn’t expected.

Sir Tom Stoppard, Playwright: I came out very dry-eyed and quite happy with the show. A woman approached me. And she was drenched in tears. And I suddenly started crying with her.

I just went — I just switched straight into her state of mind. And, actually, this is new with me. I have shed more tears over watching “Leopoldstadt” than the rest of my work put together.

Jeffrey Brown: Stoppard, now 85 and often described as the greatest living English playwright, has written some 37 plays and earned four Tony Awards.

Speaker (scene from “Shakespeare in Love”): That woman is a woman!

Jeffrey Brown: He also won an Oscar for the screenplay of the movie “Shakespeare in Love.”

“Leopoldstadt” is different and more personal, a kind of coming to terms with what he saw as the charmed life he’d lived and all that it concealed.

We talked recently at famed Broadway restaurant Sardi’s.

Sir Tom Stoppard: And by the time I was an English schoolboy, then an English journalist, and then an English playwright, the idea of having a kind of charmed life was familiar to me, until it turned and bit me, because, finally, I felt rebuked by the attitude.

Jeffrey Brown: Tom Stoppard, the English playwright, was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His parents, Jewish on both sides, took him and his brother to Singapore to escape the Nazi invasion. His father was killed by the Japanese, and his mother fled again, taking her sons to India, where she later married an Englishman.

At age 8, young Tom was brought to England, his Jewish past and family left behind.

Was it a question of knowing, or a suppressed past, or a lack of desire to know about it?

Sir Tom Stoppard: All of the above. My mother was very relieved to have found sanctuary for herself and her two sons when the war ended. She didn’t want to look back, and she never spoke about the past, except just very casually occasionally.

And I also have to own up to not really having sufficient curiosity about it, partly because my mother didn’t want to talk about it.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): There are thousands leaving every month. The Office of Jewish Immigration can’t get rid of the Jews fast enough.

Jeffrey Brown: “Leopoldstadt” is the result of years of reckoning with a history Stoppard only learned about in full in his 50s, when a Czech relative told him that all four of his Jewish grandparents and three of his mother’s sisters had been murdered by the Nazis.

The play’s family is not his, but their experiences would have been similar.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): By miracle, Hermann has kept the business going through war, revolution, inflation and now Anschluss, and saved it for Jacob. Why give it all away now?

[Anschluss (or Anschluß) is the common German word of ‘connection,’ but in this context, it’s usually translated as ‘annexation,’ specifically of Austria by the Third Reich (in 1938). (That funny little squiggle at the end of the second spelling is the Eszett, a letter only used in Standard German—the Swiss no longer use it, for instance—that represents a double-s in certain instances.)]

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): The Nazis will take it.

Jeffrey Brown: The Nazis do take, all of it, the business, the home, and most of their lives.

And then Stoppard gives us a final scene set after the war in 1955.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): No more family business.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): And not much family, a New Yorker, an Austrian, and a clean young Englishman.

Jeffrey Brown: With three survivors, one of them a young Englishman, who’d come to his new country at age 8 and was oblivious to the Holocaust horror and toll on his own family.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): I’m sorry you had a rotten war.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): A rotten war?

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): Yes, I’m sorry.

Jeffrey Brown: A stand-in for Stoppard himself.

Sir Tom Stoppard: The boy in the play is rebuked in the words, you live as if without history. And that was rather me.

Jeffrey Brown: The specific line is: “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

That was you?

Sir Tom Stoppard: Yes. Yes.

And I guess this play “Leopoldstadt” is the shadow behind me.

Jeffrey Brown: The play also, he knows, has a new relevance and force to it . . .

Marchers: Jews will not replace us!

Jeffrey Brown: . . . as overt antisemitism has been on the rise around the globe.

Sir Tom Stoppard: There’s a line in the play where the young man says to the Jewish survivor, he says, it can’t happen again. And it feels such a clunky line. It’s a line plucked from the clunkiness of how long people have been in the past.

But it’s inescapable now.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s resonating again.

Sir Tom Stoppard: It’s certainly resonating. And all kinds of things are now happening in America, as in Europe, which you would not have anticipated a generation ago, half-a-generation ago.

Jeffrey Brown: After “Leopoldstadt” premiered in London just before the pandemic began, Stoppard caused tremors in the theater world by suggesting this could be his final play.

Now, as it stuns audiences on Broadway, he’s resolved to continue.

Sir Tom Stoppard: I don’t know what the thing is that I’m going to be turned on by. And it could be anything. And that is my situation as I sit here talking to you, Jeff. It could be anything. And I’d like to get back to my desk and write another play.

Jeffrey Brown: “Leopoldstadt” is scheduled to run through March 12.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF TOM STOPPARD 

Sir Tom Stoppard, widely regarded as the English-speaking world’s greatest living playwright, was born Tomáš Sträussler on 3 July 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic).  One of the most intellectual of modern playwrights—though he never went to university—his work has been described as “plays of ideas,” philosophical deliberations made entertaining mostly by their wordplay, jokes, innuendo, and sense of fun.

Stoppard’s parents, Eugen Sträussler (1908-42), a doctor, and Marta (Becková) Sträussler (1911-98), were non-observant Jews and when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in July 1939, the Sträusslers fled to Singapore, where the company for which Dr. Sträussler worked had a branch. 

After the Japanese invasion (February 1942), Eugen Sträussler sent his wife and sons Tomáš and Petr (b. 1935) to India while he stayed behind to help the British army as a medical volunteer.  Dr. Sträussler was killed trying to escape Singapore in 1942 when the ship he was on was bombed by the Japanese.

In late 1945, Marta Sträussler married Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British army.  The next year, the family went to live in England where Tomáš Sträussler became Tom Stoppard and Petr became Peter; both boys took their stepfather’s surname.  Stoppard quit school at 17 and started his career as a journalist in Bristol in 1954.

He began to write plays in 1960 after moving to London.  His first play, A Walk on the Water (1960), was televised in 1963 and the stage version, with some additions and the new title Enter a Free Man, reached London in 1968 (New York première at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church, 1974).

1966 saw the publication of Stoppard’s only novel, Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon (U.S. publication, 1969).  That same year, Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was performed at the Edinburgh Festival.  Arguably his best-known play, it rapidly became internationally renowned.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern transferred to Broadway in 1967 and received a Tony Award for best play.  More successes followed.  

[I posted a two-part analysis of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, entitled “Theatrical Structure,” on Rick On Theater on 15 and 18 February 2011.]

Among the playwright’s most notable stage plays are The Real Inspector Hound (1968; Off-Broadway, New York, 1972), Jumpers (1972; Broadway, 1974), Travesties (1974; also Broadway, Tony Award for best play), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1978; New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House, 1979), Night and Day (1978; Broadway, 1979), Undiscovered Country (1980, adapted from a play by Arthur Schnitzler; U.S. première by Connecticut’s Hartford Stage Company, 1981; no New York production), and On the Razzle (1981, adapted from a play by Johann Nestroy; U.S. première at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., 1982; Off-Broadway, Bouwerie Lane Theatre, 1999).

(The National Theatre staging of On the Razzle was filmed and broadcast on the BBC on 30 January 1983.  It was subsequently aired in the U.S. on PBS’s Great Performances on 3 January 1986.)

The Tony-winning The Real Thing (1982; Broadway, 1984), Stoppard’s first romantic comedy, deals with art and reality and features a playwright as a protagonist.  Arcadia, which juxtaposes 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century chaos theory and is set in a Derbyshire country house, premièred at the National Theatre in 1993 (Broadway. 1995), and The Invention of Love, about A. E. Housman, was first staged in 1997 (Broadway. 2001).

During a lunch break in rehearsals at Arcadia one day in 1993, a year after the fall of European communism, Stoppard met for the first time with visiting Czech relatives.  A cousin made a stunning revelation: the writer’s parents were both Jewish. (Immediately after the war and the Stoppards’ move to England, his stepfather had told him to keep his Jewish heritage a secret for safety’s sake.  He’d thought that just his father was Jewish.)

The dramatist also learned that many of his relatives, including all four grandparents, a great-grandparent, and three of his mother’s sisters, had perished in Nazi death camps.  He was stunned.

Stoppard didn’t confront the matter of his lost past directly as a dramatist until 2020’s Leopoldstadt (see below), a play about several generations of a Jewish family like his own might have been, living in Vienna through the Anschluss, World War II, and the Holocaust.

The trilogy The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), first performed in 2002 (Broadway, 2006/07), explores the lives and debates of a circle of 19th-century Russian émigré intellectuals; it received a Tony Award for best play.  Heroes (2005; U.S. première, Los Angeles, 2007; New York première, Off-Broadway, 2009), translated from a play by Gérald Sibleyras, is set in a retirement home for French soldiers, and it received a Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy (see my report on ROT on 26 March 2009). 

Rock ’n’ Roll (2006; Broadway, 2007) jumps between England and Czechoslovakia during the period 1968-90.  In The Hard Problem (2015; Off-Broadway, Public Theater, 2018), Stoppard explored consciousness.  Leopoldstadt (West End, 2020), Stoppard’s latest play, follows a Jewish family in Vienna from the early 20th century through the Holocaust; the critically acclaimed work won the Olivier Award for best new play.  Leopoldstadt opened on Broadway on 2 October 2022.

The new play, possibly Stoppard’s last, he predicts, was met in London with laudatory reviews.  The production received two Olivier Awards, including one for Best Play.  In New York City, where it opened just three weeks ago, it’s received good to excellent notices (one of which is posted below) and is being seen as the writer’s most emotional play of his canon.

Stoppard also wrote a number of radio plays, including In the Native State (1991), which was reworked as the stage play Indian Ink (1995; Off-Broadway, Roundabout Theatre Company, 2014).  He also wrote a number of notable television plays, such as Professional Foul (BBC, 1977).  

Among his early screenplays are those for The Romantic Englishwoman (Dial Films and Les Productions Meric-Matalon, 1975), Despair (Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978), and Brazil (Embassy International Pictures, 1985), as well as for a film version (Brandenberg and WNET/Channel 13 New York, 1990) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that he also directed.

In 1999, the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (Bedford Falls, 1998), cowritten by Stoppard and Marc Norman, won an Academy Award. Stoppard also adapted the French screenplay for the English-language film Vatel (Legende Enterprises and Gaumont, 2000), about a 17th-century chef, and wrote the screenplay for Enigma (Jagged Films snd Broadway Video, 2001), which chronicles the English effort to break the German Enigma code in World War II.

The dramatist later penned scripts for a lavish miniseries (BBC, 2012; HBO, 2013) based on novelist Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End and for a film adaptation (Working Title Films and StudioCanal, 2012) of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.  He also cowrote the historical drama Tulip Fever (Worldview Entertainment, Weinstein Company, and Ruby Films, 2017), which is set in 17th-century Amsterdam.

Stoppard received a C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1978 and was knighted in 1997 for contributions to theater by Queen Elizabeth II.  His numerous other honors include the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theater/film (2009) and, he was awarded the Order of Merit in May 2000 and elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, in July 2017.  

On 23 February 2021, Alfred A. Knopf released Hermione Lee’s biography Tom Stoppard: A Life (also available in paperback and audiobook).  Leopoldstadt was published in 2020 by Grove Press.

*  *  *  *
“TOM STOPPARD RESURRECTS THE PAST IN ‘LEOPOLDSTADT’”
by Helen Shaw

A crowded portrait of a glittering prewar Jewish milieu exorcises the playwright’s own ghosts.

[Helen Shaw’s review of Leopoldstadt ran in “The Theatre” section of the New Yorker in the 17 October 2022 issue.  It was posted on the magazine’s website on 6 October 2022.]

The word on “Leopoldstadt,” the latest drama by Tom Stoppard (at the Longacre), is that this time, at last, he gets personal. In Hermione Lee’s immense 2020 Stoppard biography [Tom Stoppard: A Life, 896 pages], in recent interviews and profiles, and even via links e-mailed to ticket buyers before the show, we read that the playwright has finally abandoned what Clive James [1939-2019; Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer, and lyricist who worked in the U.K.] called his “ebullient detachment” and broached the topic of his Jewish identity and a long-gestating survivor’s grief. Some critics have been looking for this turn for decades. In 1977, in this magazine, Kenneth Tynan compared the stories Stoppard used in his plays (wild coincidences with peacocks and shaving foam) with the one he never did share: his 1939 flight, at the age of eighteen months, from the Nazis. He was then Tomáš Sträussler, and he travelled with his Jewish family from Czechoslovakia to Singapore; his mother then evacuated him and his brother to Darjeeling, and from there to England, where he was given a new name and little knowledge of all that had been lost. Stoppard was fifty-six before he learned the facts about his Czech family’s religion, the extent of their persecution, and the long list of cousins and aunts and grandparents who were murdered in the camps.

Given the rumors of “Leopoldstadt”’s autobiographical underpinnings, it is somewhat surprising to find that when the curtain rises we are not in Prague but in Vienna, in a bustling apartment where two intermarried, interfaith families, the Merzes and the Jakoboviczes, meet and celebrate. In five intermissionless acts, Stoppard rappels down the twentieth century: we see the families in 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938, and 1955. The set designer Richard Hudson shows us the Merzes’ stately apartment as it changes over time, from brocade-upholstered warmth to interwar sleekness, then from post-Anschluss tenement squalor to a terrible postwar emptiness. In each section, characters turn to or away from their Jewishness, often looking for a sense of belonging or national identity or safety. Of course, there is never safety. We hear history (a subliminal rumble from the sound designer Adam Cork) preparing to break over the families like a wave.

In 1899, the Merz family is prosperous and variously assimilationist—we begin at a glittering Christmas party, which has a tree topped accidentally with a Star of David—but they and the Jakoboviczes will fall through two World Wars, losing nearly everything in the process. “Leopoldstadt” requires more than two dozen performers, and many actors play several parts, including children who grow up and whose identities must be referred to at a dash. How to keep the generations straight? A handwritten family tree appears several times in slides on a black scrim that serves as the stage curtain, and the program helps, but for much of the show’s two-plus hours the audience is left scrambling to remember when Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz) and his wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow), had a child, and whether shy Hanna (Colleen Litchfield) is Gretl’s niece or her sister-in-law. Stoppard makes jokes about this complexity—characters stumble over the relationships, too—though the humor is not always intentional. One cousin asks another if she remembers a certain dead soldier’s childhood, and the woman responds, “He was the nicest big brother in the world.” We can assume she remembers him.

The first scene is a welter of references to Viennese thought and art—Freud, Mahler, Klimt—and the coming destruction of that golden culture is one of the tragedies of the play. Over whiskey, Hermann and his mathematician brother-in-law, Ludwig Jakobovicz (Brandon Uranowitz), argue about Hermann’s blithe disregard of Austrian anti-Semitism. Hermann is joining the Jockey Club and—a mathematician, you say? Your inner Stoppard gong should ring at that; this is the playwright who taught us chaos theory [Arcadia] and probability [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern]. When Ludwig later tries to demonstrate coördinate geometry using a cat’s cradle, we can see that one of Stoppard’s famous Knowledge Metaphors is twisting itself into view. And, indeed, like the knots on Ludwig’s cat’s-cradle string, family members change positions yet maintain their connection. By the bitter fifth act, set in 1955, there are huge differences between the destroyed families’ three lone revenants—an American émigrée, an Auschwitz survivor, and an English humorist who remembers nothing. They stand in an apartment that’s as bare as an abandoned lot. Nevertheless, they are cousins, still tied by the family string.

The armatures of Stoppard pieces are often other plays: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” rests on “Hamlet”; “Travesties” travesties “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Here, his vision of Vienna borrows from the provocative turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler (Freud called him his “psychic twin”), whose work Stoppard has adapted several times. In the 1900 section, he reworks elements from “Dalliance,” his own adaptation of Schnitzler’s cynical “Liebelei”—again, there’s a cavalier dragoon named Fritz having an affair (this time with Gretl) and the threat of a duel. “Leopoldstadt” makes reference to another Schnitzler play, “Reigen” [usually translated as La Ronde] in the course of the action, and begins to echo its structure, with two-character scenes linked in a daisy chain: Hanna and Gretl, Gretl and the dragoon, the dragoon and Hermann. Stoppard uses content and structure to point to a playwright whom many in the audience will not know, and even this unknowing is important. Stoppard’s subject, after all, is forgetting.

The 1924 act shifts its tone, borrowing from [Noël] Coward and [P. G.] Wodehouse, and is animated by both the Charleston and a farcical misunderstanding. The families gather for a baby’s circumcision, and a Gentile banker is mistaken for the mohel [the person who performs the circumcision in a Jewish bris]. (Hermann: “What are you talking about?” Grandma: “Foreskins!”) Some in this generation bear the wounds of the First World War, but these are largely ignored in favor of the new baby, the new dance craze. A [Gustav] Klimt portrait of Gretl in a green shawl hangs above the sideboard; beneath it, her niece Nellie is sewing a red flag, a symbol of the socialist movement that will be a pretext for yet more anti-Semitic vitriol. Swiftly, though, we’re on to the next act. In 1938, both green shawl (art) and red flag (politics) will disappear, trampled by the Reich’s jackboots.  [The Anschluss—Germany’s annexation of Austria—took place on 13 March 1938.]

Stoppard has described his writing as a “series of small, large, and microscopic ambushes,” and there’s a quality of intentional frustration here—dramatic plots crowd in and break off, and key confrontations remain offstage, experienced mainly in retrospect. What happens with Hermann and the dragoon? Or Nellie’s march for the workers? You might find out, but by the time you do there’ll be a Nazi pounding on the door.

Stoppard has always believed in creating difficulty for his audiences, writing intellectual high-wire acts (“Jumpers,” “The Invention of Love”) and idea-in-action masterpieces (“Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Arcadia,” “The Real Thing”). In these plays, dazzling flights of language manage to make us think and feel simultaneously, to experience both sorts of internal action. Here, though, the challenge lies in keeping the narratives straight, and that difficulty crowds out conceptual engagement and emotional connection. It deprives us of the crucial Stoppardian pleasure, the opportunity to think in real time alongside a mental acrobat.

Could this be deliberate? Is Stoppard snatching away the expected, fictional climaxes in order to point to the “real” grief of the last scene? Certainly, the final moment is wrenching: the audience gasps with tears as the survivors tell their English cousin (who knows as little as the young Stoppard did) what happened to each old man and sweet child. But the drama’s other emotional currents simply haven’t registered. In his rush to cram so much into abbreviated scenes, Stoppard veers toward self-parody, particularly when Ludwig talks about math like a character aware that he’s speaking the theme of the play. The writer’s many gifts do not include compression on this scale. His orchestration is off; in all the hurry, we cannot hear the motifs when we need to, or the individual voices.

The staging is at least partly to blame. The director, Patrick Marber, has imported his production from the U.K., and his mostly new, mostly American cast has, for some reason, been told to speak with a British accent. (In London, that was the neutral choice—on Broadway, it seems affected.) Perhaps out of nervousness about audibility, Marber has his performers stay far apart and yell their lines from opposite sides of the stage; Hermann and Ludwig, in their first conversation, sound as intimate as two guys trying to park a semi. People must rapidly communicate their backstories (Why am I missing this eye? Where did my first husband go?) amid the clamor of other characters, and this just leads to more shouting. Uranowitz is the only one who goes big but maintains his precision; Castelow resists the melodramatic tide, much to her credit. There is, at least, a prettily staged Passover Seder: the lighting designer Neil Austin bathes the scene in a deep, resinous glow, a moment preserved in amber.

As I watched the play, I couldn’t work out why so much of it left me unmoved, and it was only afterward that I began to follow its bread crumbs into the dark. For instance, why is the play called “Leopoldstadt”? The word refers to the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, but the Merz apartment isn’t situated there. I can think of two reasons. One is that the Stoppard stand-in is called Leopold (changed to the more English Leonard), and this play’s gilt-and-black Vienna is the “stadt” of his lost memory, a city he will need to either rebuild or abandon. The other possibility is that we’re meant to wonder. If we look it up, we learn that the sector was named for King Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor who expelled Austria’s Jews, in 1670. Of course, the tides shifted, and Jewish families returned a few decades later. They flowed back into a neighborhood now named for their tormentor, setting up house in the ashes of the pogrom.

In the end, much of what I found moving about “Leopoldstadt” was not onstage. Instead, it came in the reading that the play persuades you to do, and in the memories of those other Stoppard pieces, which waltz and curtsy in the mind. The show sent me to read [Kenneth] Tynan and James and [Hermione, I presume] Lee; it sent me to those beautiful interviews with the man himself. Stoppard’s frequent collaborator Carey Perloff recently published “Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View” [Methuen Drama, 2022], and she spends a chapter discussing his not quite forgotten, always sort of known Jewishness, the way it emerged in past work as stories about doubles and twins, or heritage that is torn down and lost. Her book helped me think about where Stoppard’s experience surfaces in Hermann, a man who both knows and does not know his true situation, a man who thinks he has won the coin toss while the coin is still in the air.

The more you learn, the more you feel. (That might be a central tenet of Stoppardianism.) The particular lesson in “Leopoldstadt” is that we are responsible even for the things we do not know. Here is a play that strikes deepest if you understand its origin: a conversation in a café between Stoppard and a cousin he didn’t realize he had, while his mother sits at the other end of the table, upset that he is finding out the truth. You will have to seek out that story yourself, but at least it’s easy to find. Stoppard, notoriously, is a man who does the research. Why should his audience not have to do it, too?

[Helen Shaw joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2022. Previously, she was the theatre critic at New York magazine and also its culture vertical, Vulture. She has also written about theater and performance for 4Columns and Time Out New York and contributed to the New York Sun, American Theatre magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Art in America, and Artforum. She was co-awarded the 2017-18 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.]