Tom Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama follows four generations of the Austrian Jewish Merz family – from a happy family Christmas in 1899 Vienna through to a powerful and overwhelming conclusion.

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Two Screenings:

Saturday 5 Feb 7pm  &  Monday 14 Feb 1pm

Tom Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama follows four generations of the Austrian Jewish Merz family – from a happy family Christmas in 1899 Vienna through to a powerful and overwhelming conclusion.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, Vienna 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 - hundreds of thousands had fled from the Pale of Settlement and the pogroms in the East and many found sanctuary in the crowded tenements of Vienna’s old Jewish quarter, Leopoldstadt.

But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann’s extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and – for Austrian Jews – the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered.  

It is for the survivors to pass on a story which hasn’t ended yet.

 

★★★★★ ‘Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece. Magnificent.’ Independent
★★★★ ‘Tom Stoppard’s new masterwork is an early contender for play of the year.’ Evening Standard
★★★★ ‘Breathtaking, the work of a master.’ Time Out
★★★★ Financial Times                ★★★★The Times
★★★★Whats On Stage               ★★★★Telegraph

Playwright Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia - with his parents and brother Peter, the family escaped the day the Nazis occupied their country in 1939. Tom’s parents had not talked about their history and Tom nor Peter knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Tom discovered that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in camps, including Auschwitz, along with three of his mother's sisters.

Now Sir Tom Stoppard, he has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Though Leopoldstadt is fictional, it is based on autobiography - his most personal play and perhaps his last. As such, there is something momentous about Leopoldstadt, which has the weight and majesty of a final drama.


A screening of the performance of Leopoldstadt captured live on stage at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre in October 2021 and first broadcast to the UK and Europe on 27 January 2022, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1945 on this day the Auschwitz concentration camps were liberated by the Red Army.

Duration 2 hours 20 minutes, no interval.


  • For patrons with mobility difficulties and Companion Card holders please call our Box Office on 07 4122 6060 Monday to Friday 8:30am - 4:00pm to enquire or make your booking.
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