ARTS AND CULTURE

Tom Stoppard

Playwright

One of Britain’s most celebrated playwrights, Sir Tom Stoppard’s work returned to the London stage in 2021 with the opening of “Leopoldstadt” – the 84-year-old’s “reckoning with his Jewish roots,” according to The New York Times. The play tells the story of a Jewish family experiencing prosperity in Vienna during the first half of the twentieth century after fleeing from pogroms in Eastern Europe. According to Stoppard the play "took a year to write, but the gestation was much longer. Quite a lot of it is personal to me, but I made it about a Viennese family so that it wouldn’t seem to be about me." In 2022, “Leopoldstadt” came to the New York stage, and was hailed by the New York Times as a “heart-rending epic.” (Photo: Wikimedia / Creative Commons License)