Leopoldstadt

Premier is proud to be providing publicity for the world premiere of Tom Stoppard’s new play Leopoldstadt, directed by Patrick Marber. Previewing now at Wyndham’s Theatre, with opening night on 12th February, the play is the sixth collaboration between Sonja Friedman Productions and Tom Stoppard, and reunites Stoppard, Marber and Friedman who last collaborated on Travesties in 2017.

Vienna in 1900 was the most vibrant city in Europe, humming with artistic and intellectual excitement and a genius for enjoying life. A tenth of the population were Jews. A generation earlier they had been granted full civil rights by the Emperor, Franz Josef. Consequently, hundreds of thousands fled from the Pale and the pogroms in the East and many found sanctuary in the crowded tenements of the old Jewish quarter, Leopoldstadt. Tom Stoppard’s new play, directed by Patrick Marber, is an intimate drama with an epic sweep; the story of a family who made good. “My grandfather wore a caftan,” says Hermann, a factory owner, “my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner.” It was not to last. Over the next fifty years this family, like millions of others, was to re-discover what it meant to be Jewish in the first half of the 20th century. Leopoldstadt is a passionate drama of love, endurance and loss. It is Stoppard’s most humane and heart-breaking play.