Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I guess it was it was March of 2020 “Leopoldstadt” opened. Several weeks later, it had to close down, right at the height of its sort of attention by the crowd. How did that feel to you? And did you ever think that it was going to reopen?

TOM STOPPARD, PLAYWRIGHT: Well, I would say that I felt lucky before I felt unlucky, because we had played for a few weeks. And there were other shows which were just about to kick off when the whole thing came down. And then it was somewhat frustrating. But nobody said at the time that we were going to be out of the theater for 16 months or so. We were thinking, maybe in two or three months, we will be back and so on.

AMANPOUR: What was the inspiration of that? Why did you decide, at this part of your life, to tackle something that’s more autobiographical than anything you have done before?

STOPPARD: Because I began to understand that it was somewhat kind of inward-looking just to keep talking about my own charmed life, as though I had no history, to quote the play in the end. But that, in the end, I have to say is what — why the play was written. And everything up front is just giving myself the history which I was never really quite acknowledging.

AMANPOUR: Well, that’s the point. And that is an incredibly important point, actually. I just want to just take you back to 1993, which I think is when you discovered that, in fact, you had been born Jewish, to Jewish parents. A cousin of yours had come to you when you were in production at the National Theatre. And she revealed that the bulk of your Jewish family, your great grandparent, four of your grandparents and indeed another relative, had been killed in the death camps. First, I want to know, what was your reaction when you were told that?

STOPPARD: Well, first of all, it wasn’t like a sudden door opening. It wasn’t a before and after.

AMANPOUR: But you hadn’t known it until she came and told you.

STOPPARD: My question to her was, how Jewish were we, more than, were we Jewish? Of course…

AMANPOUR: What did you mean?

STOPPARD: Well, I was perfectly well aware that we left Czechoslovakia, as it were, in flight from the Nazis. And my mother didn’t really want to talk about it much. But she shrugged the whole thing off. It in the way of a lot of saying — back in 1938, if you had one Jewish grandparents, you were in trouble. So she ended up with her husband dead in the war in Singapore. We ended up in England because my mother married a British army officer.