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033 – Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

Sep 9, 2021 | Podcast Episodes | 4 comments

Tom Stoppard’s latest play Leopoldstadt takes its name from the Jewish district of Vienna, and follows the fortunes and fates of an extended Jewish family as they live through the convulsive events of the first half of the twentieth century. As the play begins in 1899, when Vienna had claim to be the cultural capital of Europe, successful Jewish business man Hermann Merz and his family have cause to hope their hard-earned prosperity and security will be long-lasting. Over the next fifty years however we witness their diaspora and decline through the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the First World War, through the Anschluss in 1938 and the death camps that followed, to 1955 when the world is attempting to process the horror and guilt from the second world war.

The play is a sweeping work of history and ideas which addresses profound moral questions of identity, memory and prejudice that remain insistently relevant in our time.  It is both intellectually stimulating and piercingly poignant. It is also a very personal play, because it is in part based on Stoppard’s own remarkable family history. He himself was a Jewish refugee, who as a boy fled the Nazis in Czechoslovakia in 1938, escaping finally to England after the war, and where throughout much of his adult life he lived unaware of his Jewish ancestry or the terrible tragedies that befell them.

Tom Stoppard is of course one of the most acclaimed and prolific playwrights of our time, renowned for his intellectual brilliance and wit in plays such as Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia and The Hard Problem, to name a selected few. Written as he entered his eighties Leopoldstadt is a towering achievement.

The play opened in London’s West End in January 2020, only to be prematurely closed by the first pandemic lockdown a few weeks later. Happily it has been revived for another London run this Autumn. I’m delighted to be joined in this episode to talk about the play by Patrick Marber, who directed both London productions. Patrick is uniquely qualified to share insights into this play and Stoppard’s work, having also recently directed Travesties in London and New York.

 

Patrick Marber

Patrick Marber is a writer, director, actor and comedian. Patrick began his career as a stand-up comedian, before becoming a writer and cast member on the radio shows On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You, and their television spinoffs The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You… with Alan Partridge.

In addition to his acclaimed credits as a director, Patrick is the author of a dozen plays including Dealer’s Choice, Closer, Howard Katz and The Red Lion, as well as adaptations of plays by Strindberg (After Miss Julie), Moliere (Don Juan in Soho), Turgenev (A Month in the Country) and Ibsen (Hedda Gabler). He is also a screenwriter, adapting his play Closer into the 2004 film directed by Mike Nichols, as well as the screenplays for Asylum and Notes on a Scandal.

Recommended Play

Patrick recommended The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer.

Photo © Marc Brenner
We have footnotes for this episode …

The Footnotes to our episode on Tom Stoppard’s majestic play Leopoldstadt include observations on the origins of its title, the metaphoric resonances of the child’s game, Cat’s Cradle, and how Gustav Klimt’s art is an apt choice to help paint the play’s story.​

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4 Comments

  1. Joseph Dunne-Howrie

    Hi,

    When I play this episode from my Google podcast provider the Happy Days episode plays instead. Do you know how I can find the Leopoldstadt one?

    Reply
    • Douglas Schatz

      Hi Joseph
      The Leopoldstadt episode seems to be up on Google Podcasts. Is this where you are trying to listen to it? Have you been able to yet?
      If it is still a problem for you, please send me a link to where you are trying to access the episode.
      You can also visit our website at http://www.theplaypodcast.com to listen to any episode. Thanks for your interest. Douglas

      Reply
  2. Celerino Abad-Zapatero

    I enjoyed very much the podcast and insights on Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt’.
    Was fortunate to see it in New York , Nov. 30th.
    I needed to read the script, taking my time, to absorb the condensed text ‘a la Tom Stoppard’ and
    this podcast shed further light on bits that I had missed.

    I think that a podcast should be devoted to another of the most recent Stoppard’s play
    The Hard Problem…. and clarify, explain, the issues addressed in the play about ‘ultra-Darwinism’ in the social sciences.
    The importance of the issues addressed in the play in a ‘Tom Stoppard’s way’ are very important.

    Reply
    • Douglas Schatz

      Thank you Celerino. I would very much like to cover more Stoppard plays – there are many great ones to choose from!

      You may also be interested in the Footnotes that I compiled about Leopoldstadt after the podcast. You can find them at http://www.theplaypodcast.com/jerusalem-footnotes/

      Thanks for listening.
      Douglas

      Reply

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