The play’s British run was cut short last year by the coronavirus pandemic. And so it will be interesting to see how a new generation of “woke” drama critics responds to Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s latest play, a bleak story of the devastation wrought by the Holocaust on Vienna’s Jewish community. This attitude, heightened still further by the rise of radical identitarianism, has lately taken root in the U.S. On the other hand, he really does write about ideas-they are, indeed, his preferred subject matter-and this has caused some critics to characterize him as a kind of theatrical journalist who builds his work atop the thoughts of greater men, among them Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), and Alexander Herzen in The Coast of Utopia (2002).Ĭall him what you will, Stoppard cuts decisively against the grain of postwar theater, above all in England, where it is now increasingly (if not universally) taken for granted that the best theater is political and that the causes its practitioners advocate must perforce be left-liberal. A passionate anti-utopian, his only “cause” is unswerving opposition to totalitarianism, and he writes about it not as a political cause but as an unintended consequence of the coming of modernity.

Yet his three-dozen-odd plays elude easy categorization, and it is a further puzzlement that a writer notorious for trafficking in abstruse intellectual concepts should have won popularity on both sides of the Atlantic.Īt first glance, he would appear to be a practitioner of what used to be called the “theater of ideas,” but such writers are usually issue-driven propagandists like Ibsen and Shaw. At 83, Tom Stoppard is widely regarded as the English-speaking world’s greatest living playwright.

Tom stoppard 1966 play