Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

**WINNER OF THE TONY AWARD FOR BEST PLAY**

"Breathtaking . . . A play that asks what we owe our own imperfect memories . . . An epic, formatively brilliant work."--Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

Tom Stoppard's humane and heartbreaking play of love, family and endurance.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today's most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.

Tomás Straüssler was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 and immigrated to England with his family in 1946. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered in London in 1967, he was instantly catapulted into the forefront of modern playwrights. He is the phenomenally celebrated author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert's Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist et etc. He's also authored screenplays for films like The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil. He received the David Cohen Award for lifetime accomplishment in literature in 2017.