Possibly Tom Stoppard's most heart-breaking and humane play, LEOPOLDSTADT is a hugely passionate drama about love, family, and endurance that will resume performances at the Wyndham's Theatre from August 2021.
The scene is set in Vienna in 1900. It is the most vibrant city in Europe, and positively humming with interlectual and artistic excitement, and is a playground for people who wish to enjoy life to the full. Around a tenth of the population are Jews, who a generation earlier had been granted full civil rights by the Emperor, Franz Josef himself. There were hundreds of thousands who had fled there to find sanctuary from the Pale and the pogroms in the East in the crowded tenements of Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter.
The peace was not to last though, as half a century later, this family, like millions of others, has rediscovered what it means to be Jewish at the beginning of the 20th century.