The playwright’s new work has been seen as a departure from his intellectual stock-in-trade. But look deeper, and passion has always been present
What kind of writer is Tom Stoppard? In countless profiles and reviews he has been characterised as an intellectual gymnast, a dazzling wordsmith, a glamoriser of thought: a man who can take such subjects as linguistic philosophy, Latin love poetry and quantum mechanics and turn them into the stuff of drama. If anything has been missing, it is implied, it is self-revelation and strong emotion – both of which are evident in Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s latest, and possibly last, play.
I would argue, however, that there has always been a fierce, if largely unacknowledged, emotional ground-base to Stoppard’s work. What is new about Leopoldstadt is its element of autobiography. Stoppard once told an interviewer, in an uncharacteristically clumsy phrase: “I don’t think of my life as a well into which I drop my bucket with a sense of going deeply into myself.” But in Leopoldstadt he not only traces the fortunes of an Austrian-Jewish family whose experience is analogous to that of his own Czech forebears. He also dramatises his own predicament in the character of Leo Chamberlain, a cricket and Shakespeare-loving anglophile whose parents escaped Nazi persecution in the nick of time.
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