Stoppard: new play is first to get me crying – and may be my last
SIR TOM STOPPARD, Britain’s most celebrated living playwright, believes he may have written his last work.
The 82-year-old has said that Leopoldstadt, which tells the story of a Jewish family in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, is his most moving, and possibly last, work for theatre.
It explores the rise of fascism across Europe and the deaths of millions of Jews in Nazi concentration camps – a subject close to Sir Tom’s heart given that was the fate of many of his own relatives.
Sir Tom, whose critically acclaimed plays include Travesties, The Real Thing and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, told BBC Radio 4: “I am slowing up. This one took longer to write. And the other thing is, what on earth can you write about after that?
“When I finished Leopoldstadt I thought, ‘I can’t go through all that again’. Four years tend to go by between my plays, so I will be 86 or 87 before I write another, and I wondered whether people who are 87 do have plays on. It seemed a bit implausible.”
He described the emotional turmoil he experienced tackling difficult subjects in the play, saying: “It stole up on me. I didn’t think, ‘I must finish this off and have people sobbing’, but in the end I was sobbing myself.
“I feel a bit foolish sitting there and I have to stop myself making a public spectacle of myself, crying at my own play.
“I mean, I wrote it. I ought to have some sort of writer’s objectivity. It has not happened before. Honestly, nothing I have written has had that effect on me.”
Sir Tom’s mother and father were from Czechoslovakia. His mother married her second husband, a British army officer, after the war and moved to England to start a new life.
“I once asked my mother to write down what she remembered and she said ‘wrongly or rightly, I decided to draw a line and never looked back’. So she never practised as a Jew.”
Leopoldstadt, directed by fellow playwright Patrick Marber, opens in London’s West End at Wyndham’s Theatre on Wednesday.