Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt

The play, which opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in London on February 12th, exhibits many of the trademark motifs of Sir Tom’s stellar career. There are multiple time-frames—the drama is set in Vienna between 1899 and 1955—as well as cerebral dialogue and lots of jokes. But this play, which recounts the tragic fate of a Viennese Jewish family, is different in its acutely personal theme. Sir Tom and his parents fled Czechoslovakia on the eve of the second world war; all of his grandparents died in the Holocaust. The story features a character who gets away to England and discovers only later what happened to his relatives, experiences that overlap with his creator’s. At the close of the play—which, at 82, Sir Tom has speculated might be his last—the verbal pyrotechnics for which he has always been renowned give way to a single, reverberating word: Auschwitz,