Stoppard play to screen in Australia
National Theatre Live is coming to Sydney with Olivier Award-winning play, Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard. Showing from this weekend in select cinemas around Australia.
Had enough of the fluff on TV? Looking for the hearty Viennese goulash equivalent of moviegoing experiences?
A live-recorded version of Leopoldstadt — the play by Tom Stoppard following generations of a Jewish family living in Vienna, from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th — is set to screen in Sydney this weekend.
The cinematic version is produced by the UK’s National Theatre Live (NT Live), which promises to capture a play “in all its glory”.
Director Patrick Marber remarked in an interview with Stoppard that Leopoldstadt represents Stoppard’s most direct treatment yet of Jewish subject matter.
Stoppard, who was “born in a town you could drive to from Vienna”, said there was an aspect of “unfinished business” that personally drove him to write this play. Stoppard himself discovered in the 1990s that his grandparents had all been Jewish and had all died in the Shoah.
Though Stoppard told Marber he had written in the 1960s about the plight of Russian Jews denied exit visas to Israel, he drew a line between his past and recent work.
Leopoldstadt, Stoppard said, is not “metatheatre” – the highly self-aware and self-commenting kind of work for which he was famed, such as his existentialist Shakespearean comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
These days, Stoppard said, “I like theatre more than I like metatheatre.”
Produced by Sonia Friedman, whose other works include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Leopoldstadt premiered in London’s West End in 2020, and won Olivier Awards for Best New Play and Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
The latter award went to Adrian Scarborough for his turn as Hermann Merz, a wealthy manufacturer and baptised Jew who is married to a Catholic, and identifies strongly as an Austrian.
Despite the play’s title, Merz, like the other well-to-do Jewish characters in the play, does not actually live in Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, which as Stoppard explained, became a “really overcrowded” refuge for European Jews seeking safety in the empire of Franz Joseph, after he “emancipated his Jews”.
Stoppard’s play is instead set in “the posh side of town” of Vienna, hothouse of the great intellectual and social ambitions of Austrian Jews. Stoppard cited the baronial Rothschilds, Schnitzler and the Jewish-born Mahler, and in the play, characters discuss mathematics and Freud.
Leopoldstadt follows the believers of those dreams as they collide with the reality of the 20th century.
Despite the subject matter, Marber revealed there are “some very good jokes.”
“The idea of making a divide between comedy and drama doesn’t do it for me… I don’t write tragedy”, said Stoppard.
“It’s a funny thing to say when I’ve written a play in which a huge tragedy occurs.”
Said Stoppard of his approach: “The fabric that I work with seems to me to combine everything that the human heart can, as it were, feel.”
Leopoldstadt is in select cinemas from this weekend. To book tickets: findavenue.ntlive.com/
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