Why 'Leopoldstadt' is Tom Stoppard's most personal play ever (original) (raw)
Tom Stoppard isn't a fan of putting himself into his work.
The legendary playwright, who sees his nineteenth play open on Broadway (he's written over 30 total) this Sunday, prefers to write with a more detached eye. But when sitting down to pen Leopoldstadt, his generation spanning tale of a Jewish family living in Vienna from 1899 through the mid-1950s, he couldn't help but bring his personal life into it.
"Usually, I'm ducking and diving when it comes to writing about myself," he tells EW. "I don't much like doing it. I don't really do it. I write about what I'm thinking. But I don't write about what I'm living. And in this case, I got to a point in my life where I just wanted to write as honestly as I could about what it was like to be me at that time."
Leopoldstadt, directed by Patrick Marber, follows the lives of an extended Jewish family and their various passions, triumphs, and tragedies in the lead up to and aftermath of the Holocaust. Stoppard himself was born in Czechoslovakia, and he, his brother, and mother were Jewish refugees who settled in England when he was only eight years old.
Japhet Balaban (Otto) and Eden Epstein (Hermine) in 'Leopoldstadt'. Joan Marcus
Because his mother never talked about their past, he didn't find out until the early 1990s that all of his grandparents and three of his aunts had died in Auschwitz and other camps.
Still, Stoppard doesn't want anyone to view the play as autobiography. "It doesn't involve my real parents or siblings or anything like that," he says. "I started with a clean slate of a family in Vienna, which I just found much more interesting than my own life. Because Vienna at the period I'm writing about is one of the most interesting places on God's earth because of the culture."
Stoppard, who is now 85, has produced a staggering body of work (not only plays, but screenplays, including the Best Picture winning Shakespeare in Love), and he's won four Best Play Tony Awards (the most of any writer in history). He's optimistic that Leopoldstadt won't be his swan song.
As he prepares to bring another play to Broadway, we caught up with Stoppard to find out what inspired him to write so personally for the first time, why he wrote for a staggering 38-person ensemble the size of which we rarely see in straight plays anymore, and what he hopes his legacy will be (even if he bristles at the question).
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This play first premiered in London in 2020, but you've said it was percolating a lot longer than that. When did you first get the idea to write a play about a Jewish family spanning so many decades?
TOM STOPPARD: The idea of writing about that period and the history of the terror of it all, that's one thing, but until you have a story, you don't really have anything to start working on. Theater is a storytelling art form. In the end, I worked out that I could write about my own experience to some extent, but I didn't want it to be directly autobiographical. So, I wrote about this Viennese family between 1900 and 1955, and the last part of the play becomes very much about me because I came to England when I was eight. And there's a character in the play who comes to England when he's eight. And when he's a young man, he comes back to Vienna. He says a few things which speak for me.
I thought the second half of the play would be much more directly about my experience. This boy came to England, was turned into a little English schoolboy, and was given an English name because his mother married an Englishman. He more or less carried on with his own life without acknowledging that he had a family that had been murdered. My mother didn't like looking back. We never talked about the fact that we were Jewish refugees. I knew I had some Jewish blood in me, but she made nothing of it. By the time I was grown up and working in England, I never really gave a thought to my old heritage. Gradually, I began to understand this was something I could be writing about.
You've moved the setting from your homeland of Czechoslovakia to Vienna, but how much are those earlier sequences drawing on what you know about your own family?
I wasn't actually at all interested in that. I did research my own family quite independently a few years earlier. But I wasn't interested in using information about my Czech family for my play. I wanted to invent a family, and I invented a middle class family, a quite wealthy manufacturer and various siblings and in-laws. At the time of writing this play, it was really not at all usual to have so many people on stage. One got to a place in the theater where it made sense to write a play with maybe four people, even six or seven, but my friend, producer, Sonia Friedman, she gave me carte blanche, and I seized it with both hands. I didn't worry about how many actors she would end up having to employ — so, we have a play which requires a couple of dozen actors and several little children. It's a large enterprise now.
Would you say this is your most personal play?
Yes, I would. I would say that simply on the strength of a few lines in the last 20 minutes of the play.
How did you choose the five specific years each act of the play would occur across? Did you try out different ones or think about going past 1955?
I didn't know how far past 1955 I would get. When I was writing it, I didn't even know where it would stop. But the play develops its own trajectory like an arrow shot through the air, and it's going to land where it lands. It just feels like the natural place to arrive at, and on a more empirical, practical level, I was also interested in trying to tell the whole story in a couple of hours and not make it a very long play. The play had two London existences interrupted by COVID. And the first time we did the play, we did it with an intermission. And the second time we did the play, we did it without the intermission. And I much preferred it, and I think everybody preferred it. So in New York, we are playing it without an intermission. I'm trying to find a balance between on the one hand, not stopping, but just keep going, and on the other hand, to try to get everything in to something just over two hours.
Tom Stoppard. Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images
The play covers a lot of ground, both in terms of of time, but also the subjects it deals from infidelity to war to the Holocaust. Was there a scene or sequence that was most difficult for you to write, either because it was emotional or it took you a long while to work out?
The play has several sections. There's two sections in 1900, and then it jumps to 1924, before it gets to the Nazis in 1938. And at the time, I wrote 1938 before I'd written 1924. I've never actually written out of chronological order before. So I was still trying to find out for myself what the story was and how much of it one should be telling. This has happened to me all my life as a writer, which is I discovered that was much further down the road than I realized. It's not like a novel, which can go on for 400 or 600 pages, who cares as long as it's good. With a play one has to have an eye on the clock. And as has happened with me in the past, I realized that it was later than I thought. I had to find a way to bring things to a conclusion.
You're quite right to talk of writing being an emotional experience, because you're writing about emotional things. But it's also true that you're writing with quite a cold, objective eye to try and get the proportions right. You're trying to put yourself into the mind of the audience and to make it work on these different levels. There were a couple of times where I've felt moved by what I found myself writing and what was literally on the page. At the same time, you're really thinking, "Right, okay, pull yourself together and concentrate on the job." Because there's a level of craftsmanship, as well as a level of artfulness and getting the two things in balance is important.
As you said, this is a massive ensemble of 38 people. Were you surprised when you were writing that it turned out that way? Or was it just you had the freedom to do it so you didn't think about it?
It was the latter. I had the freedom to do it, and I didn't know quite where I was going. I was in a very lucky position of just reaching for what I needed at any given time. I was aware that actors will be playing more than one part. I was trying to imagine a play where the generations succeed each other, but you don't have to have 100 actors. You could did it with 25 say. But at the same time, you're aware that for once, you don't have to cut your coat according to the cloth. You could just make the coat any fit that you want. It's a great feeling, but I don't want to do it again. I would love to write a play where somebody comes in and puts the lights on, and then three people talk and then somebody puts the lights out, and we all go home. I'd like to write a play with just one conversation. But on this occasion, it was a liberating privilege to know that I could write about generations.
Patrick Marber, who directed the play in London is directing it again in New York. Particularly when a play is new, the relationship between director and playwright is very important. What made him the right collaborator for you, and would you like that continue?
As you probably know, Patrick is also a playwright. He is a director, and my guess is that he would like to make a career more out of directing than writing. Patrick is a younger playwright who understands plays, so it's great to be directed by somebody who could put himself into the mind of the writer. Patrick and I worked together on a play called Travesties, which we did first in London, and then in New York. He did it beautifully with great flair and wit. There were three of us really, Patrick and I and Sonia Freidman, we'd done Travesties together and now we are doing this. I never thought for a moment that I'd want to look for another director. As for the future, I don't know. I like to believe that I'll write another play before I fall over.
Your work is very cerebral, and it can tackle these expansive subjects of philosophy and history and literature and science. Why do those topics fascinate you? And how did you bring that to bear here?
I don't think of myself as having a deep knowledge of anything much, but I've got a wide curiosity. From almost when I first started writing, I was writing plays, which were as much to do with philosophical questions as biographical ones. Although these are things which I never particularly specialized in when I was at school, as I grew older, I've actually realized that I had an unfulfilled side of me which was really interested by mathematicians and physicists and philosophers. The great thing about being a playwright is that you don't have to know very much because you're telling a story to a roomful of people who also don't know very much about any of these things, but they understand the story when you're telling them a story. I can use the knowledge I have, which is definitely not deep knowledge, to construct stories. I know enough to construct a story. If I am in a conversation with a professional physicist or philosopher or mathematician, I couldn't hold my end up. But in a theater seminar, I can go on for minutes on end as though I know everything.
Did writing Leopoldstadt help you draw any new conclusions about your past or your family's history?
Well, I'm 85, and I'm not going to make any radical alteration to my past, even mentally. I'm trying to answer this and be honest with myself and with you. I have an ability to be quite detached and objective about what I'm looking at, even when what I'm looking at is my personal history and my family history. Which, in some respects, is a very tragic history. You develop a way of examining these things as an artist, rather than as a moralist. Or as a politician or polemicist. I recall times where you disappear into yourself and you emerge with something on paper where you don't know how you got there, experiences of that nature. But a lot of the time you're like somebody at the laboratory bench, and I'm very lucky to have fallen into theater as my art form because it's a wonderful experience to be working with other humane people. It's the best of both worlds — you're entirely on your own and self sufficient, and the moment you finish you need everybody around you to make it live.
The cast of 'Leopoldstadt' on Broadway. Joan Marcus
Do you think theater has changed radically over the course of your career?
I'm sure it must have done. In the '50s, before I'd even written anything really, there were plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter where I didn't understand how it was done. I could see it as fascinating to me, but I didn't know how to ever do one myself. And there were other kinds of plays where I'd think, "Oh, that one, I know how to do." Everything in theater has changed, partly because the national psychology changes and partly because the economics of theater changes and different models have become possible. But I don't know which is a chicken and which is the egg, because my feeling is that you can't write anything unless you have the personal inspiration. When you do have that, the thing that you're writing, it takes no account of how theater has changed, how taste has changed, or where things are going. You're just completely focused on the only thing that you know how to do at that moment which is to write exactly the thing you're writing and hoping for the best.
Do you feel optimistic about the future of the theater?
I have to be because it's survived its dangers. Every few decades there are new reasons for theater to die, whether it's the way TV changes, the way the theater-going habit begins to wear off with society. At the same time, young writers, they would like to have a career in movies or television, but they want to have a play on stage. They want to have their plays performed live. And that's some feeling in society and individual humans which goes back thousands of years. Hard to kill, long may it survive.
You said previously that Leopoldstadt could be your last play, but it sounds like you hope that's not the case?
I hope it's not the case. For the last year I've been reading stuff and thinking I really want to get a play started before I end up in New York City involved in a rehearsal. But I didn't make it. I'm now in New York City with rehearsals going on, and I haven't started a play, so that's not good. But I'll try and get better.
Whether or not it's your last play, what do you hope your legacy is as a playwright?
Well, I think of theater as being fundamentally recreational. Obviously, there's theater which can eviscerate people, disturb their emotions, and so on. But what joins it all together is that it's one of society's recreations, and I believe in the importance of that. People should be told a story and have it acted out for them in a way which widens and brightens their own lives. It's not work, it's recreation. Honestly, you make me sound like somebody sitting here thinking I wonder what my legacy should be. I don't think like that. But if I'm going to have a legacy, I'd like my theater to continue to be an occasional event and not just continue to exist as a text.
Leopoldstadt opens at the Longacre Theatre on Oct. 2.
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