Leopoldstadt

by Tom Stoppard

Overview

**Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play**

Finally making its Broadway debut in a limited engagement run, Tom Stoppard’s humane and heartbreaking Olivier Award-winning play of love, family, and endurance

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today’s most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802157713
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Pages:	114
Sales rank:	186,159
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tom Stoppard is the author of such seminal works as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and the trilogy The Coast of Utopia. His screen credits include Parade’s End, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma, Empire of the Sun, and Anna Karenina.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Leopoldstadt:

Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play

Winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play

“Polished to a burnished sheen by the director Patrick Marber . . . Feels like an act of personal reckoning for its creator—with who he is and what he comes from . . . A group portrait, and one of uncommon density . . . Stoppard’s most topical play . . . Here, recollection is a laser, a tool to be focused on a past teeming with harsh and essential lessons for the present.”—Ben Brantley, New York Times (Critic’s Pick)

“A story of devotion wrapped in doom . . . Through his gallery of characters, Stoppard refracts something searingly vivid about the indelible truth of one’s roots, about the erasures time and circumstances and neglect impose on memory, about the guilt that attends the survival of a genocide . . . Stoppard’s words contribute another poetic verse to a long and tragic elegy.”—Peter Marks, Washington Post

“[A] great and powerful production.”—Chloe Schama, Vogue

“Breathtaking . . . A play that asks what we owe our own imperfect memories . . . An epic, formatively brilliant work.”—Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“A moving, humane tale.”—Christian Holub, Entertainment Weekly

“Simultaneously sprawling and intimate.”—Michael Musto, The Village Voice

“A lasting gift of remembrance in the brilliant, gorgeous, and devastating new play Leopoldstadt . . . Full of digressions and discussions and dialogue as funny as it is poignant.”—Greg Evans, Deadline

“The fulfillment of a lifetime’s theatrical journey.”—Michael Billington, Guardian

“[Stoppard’s] most personal work ever, one which uses a slow excavation of his own Jewish history to create an epic family saga, examining—among many other themes—what it means to be Jewish . . . A summation of sorts.”—Sarah Crompton, Vogue

“An entirely gripping piece of theater . . . A revelation for those who are unfamiliar with its tragic tale, and it will provide a deepening understanding of the causes and consequences of Jewish hope and nostalgia in the face of the Holocaust for those who are . . . Streaked with melancholy but also with the characteristic Stoppard humor and skepticism.”—Daphne Merkin, Air Mail

“[Stoppard’s] most personal play yet.”—Times (UK)

“The news that Tom Stoppard has written a new drama ranks as top-end seismic activity.”—Telegraph

From the Publisher