The gesture is, of course, a shining metaphor for the spiritual conflicts with which Stoppard is so intricately dealing. They’re all celebrating Christmas, even as Young Jacob (Joshua Satine at the performance I saw) is placing a Jewish star atop the Christmas tree. Ludwig Jakobovicz (Brandon Uranowitz) is a leading mathematician. The family members are intermarried, businessman Hermann Merz has a gentile wife Gretl (Faye Castelow). Instead, he imagines the sizable Merz and Jakobovicz families who regard themselves as non-practicing Jews comfortably assimilated in an upscale section of 1899 Vienna, that isn’t the more Jewish-centric Leopoldstadt quarter. Specific details of Stoppard’s past aren’t incorporated into Leopoldstadt. (Ever the man with an advanced skill at British wordplay, Stoppard has labeled himself “a bounced Czech.”) And Stoppard’s Jewish beginnings were suppressed by his mother, perhaps in part because his stepfather harbored anti-Semitic sentiments. His mother married Ken Stoppard, a military man whose surname the incipient playwright took on. After his widowed mother, Martha, traveled widely with him and his brother, he was raised in England from age eight. It’s also his most autobiographical work, or, taking him at his clarifying word, it’s close enough to being about someone very like the man born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia to Jewish parents. It undeniably ranks, perhaps with Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia, as his most exhilarating, most comprehensive, most serious accomplishment. Whether it is or isn’t, it’s added to his list of astonishing works – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, The Invention of Love, Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Hard Problem, to name a few. He’s also stated that it’s his last play, although he’s apparently having second thoughts now. “It’s not a play about me” Tom Stoppard has said, referring to Leopoldstadt, which had a January 2020 London bow.
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