This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's theater podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with stars, creators, and industry leaders on Broadway and beyond. I'm Gordon Cox.

[0:19] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the playwright Tom Stoppard. Chances are, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably had at least one formative theater experience with a Stoppard play. Maybe it was the production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead you were in in college, or the day you spent marathoning The Coast of Utopia, or the matinee of Arcadia that wowed you on your first trip to London. Now 85, Stoppard has written his most personal work, and it's the hit play of the season. On a Broadway where even the most successful straight plays rarely run for more than 16 weeks, Stoppard's Leopoldstadt has drawn crowds for six months and counting. With a massive cast of more than 30, Leopoldstadt tells the sprawling story of a well-off Jewish family in Vienna during the first half of the 20th century, as they confront a rising tide of anti-Semitism that they believed they, and the world, had risen above.

Now, with Leopoldstadt still going strong on Broadway and sure to be a big part of the awards season conversation, Stoppard is in the virtual studio with me to talk about how theater intersects with the personal and the political, and he reveals what he's finding in the audience response to Leopoldstadt that he never expected.

[1:34] Gordon Cox: Leopoldstadt first premiered in London in January of 2020, a year that was tumultuous, and the show ran for a couple of months, and then a lockdown happened, and then it didn't really come back in London for almost a year and a half, it seems like, and then it ran for another few months.

[1:52] Tom Stoppard: Yes, yes, that's right. It feels like here on Broadway, the play is getting a run that it just wouldn't have been ever possible for the show in London to have just given the timing of its arrival, and I imagine that must be quite gratifying for you.

[2:14] Tom Stoppard: Well, it is indeed, because the reason I'm in town is to say goodbye to the first, it's still the same company mostly, but tomorrow night it's going to be hello to the joiners, and back when we started performing in September, I would have been very grateful and pleased altogether to think that we would be doing pretty well, well enough to be still here in March. As things turned out, we're extending now to the beginning of July, and I wouldn't have taken that for granted at any time. I don't know about the London experience, it's very hard to tell what would have happened but for Covid, but it just means that one is looking back at the earlier history of this play in a kind of curious double standard, because it seems to me like a new play, and it's been around forever, but it's a delight to be back to see it again. I was just thinking that, you know, it's a lot of people to hug in this company.

[3:50] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and the director on Broadway is Patrick Marber, who also directed the show in London, but the cast you're working with is largely American. I wonder, how does that affect how the show plays to you? Are there moments or are there themes or ideas that kind of come to the fore in ways that they maybe didn't before?

[4:18] Tom Stoppard: It's difficult to be sure about one's answers, because one adapts so fast to anything that's happening. We arrived here, in fact, we were still in the early days in London, and if one thought ahead to New York, it was with a sense that New York might actually be the natural home for this play. It's not easy to explain exactly why one had that feeling, but I should add in the same breath that as far as I'm told, I don't know that we actually have more Jewish people in our audience than any other show, many other shows, but there's a deep feeling among the people who come up to me to talk, and to the actors very much so, that they connect with this play in this town in a more intense way than I experienced in London.

In London, at the same time, there was, you know, a sprinkling of people who came along and made themselves known who were actual survivors. Mostly, of course, it's the children and the grandchildren of survivors, but in both cities there are still survivors.

[6:07] Tom Stoppard: With a play, I'll shut up in a minute, but I just wanted to say that the normal thing in one's relationship to the audience is that they express some kind of pleasure and approval. What's become normal with Leopoldstadt, among large sections of the audience, is that what they express is gratitude, and that's really quite a new experience for most writers of most plays. Gratitude. Thanks for doing this. Thank you for telling this story.

[6:42] Gordon Cox: Hmm. You can see why.

[6:44] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and much has been made of the fact that this is a play that is inspired by your family history. Does that affect what it is like for you to watch the play now?

[6:58] Tom Stoppard: Not much, because I actually stepped to one side of my family history. My family history is to do with being Czech. Actually, my father's family did live in Vienna at some point, but essentially I wasn't writing about my family until I started putting myself into the end of the play as a young Englishman. At the time, I got to the UK when I was eight, and by the time I was 18, I was about as English as anybody. Now, I kind of put myself into the play aged, I don't know, 23 or something like that. It's what I always intended to do, though before I began writing, I thought it would occupy more of the play than it actually does.

[8:05] Gordon Cox: You're the character, you're, for lack of a better word, stand-in. His journey would have been a larger part of that play?

[8:15] Tom Stoppard: Yes. I thought it would be the second half when I set off. This has happened to me quite a lot. The play changes as you're writing, and it feels quite normal to me that you run out of road, in a sense. Here we are with a scene which takes place in 1955. I was born in 1937, and the character comes to England when he is eight, but it's not me. I came to England speaking English because I was in India for four years, whereas the character does not speak English. He has to put on the English language. We don't really get told too much about that. The whole question of biography is interesting because it's not simply a matter of what is in the history books, even in the family history. It's actually much more to do with what a person thinks, what a person's opinions are. It's what a person's experience is. Mixed together, there's this character in my play who speaks for me. It's not the first time it's ever happened.

[10:00] Gordon Cox: No, I wouldn't imagine.

[10:05] Tom Stoppard: Years and years ago, I wrote a play about a playwright, and it wasn't autobiographical. My goodness, he did speak for me in all kinds of ways.

[10:17] Gordon Cox: How did you land on, as you mentioned, you sidestepped your direct family history and come at the story of the play from a different direction. How did you settle on what that new angle would be? What felt fertile about the path that you were taking the play on?

[10:42] Tom Stoppard: Well, I chose a period and a place. The play kicks off in 1899 in Vienna. Anybody who knows anything about that part of the world at the turn of the century will understand that there's an embarrassment of riches. You could write a play about people who were already or were to become very famous. You'd have this really embarrassing play where Marlow was meeting Freud, and Herzl was meeting Schnitzler, and whatever. The thing one has to do, I think, for one's own survival is to keep them all off stage, if possible, and just try to live in their atmosphere with made-up people. The answer to the question is that it's a rich field. It gives you somebody to work with. It was a great interest of mine. For example, I didn't have to buy the books I needed much because mostly I had them on my shelves. The years and years of generalized interest in what became Leopoldstadt was working on my brain while I was writing.

[12:19] Tom Stoppard: Was this, given its connection to your family history, was this play any more difficult to write than previous plays, did you find? No, they're all difficult and they're all easy. What is the next line? It's neither difficult nor easy because it's not a kind of expertise. At the same time, things arrive from nowhere and you get little presents or gifts to carry you forward. I always write from page one to the end in that order. I think I've written other plays which were more difficult to write, even though their subject matter was not as sensitive. As a matter of fact, if you're writing about a Jewish family between 1900 through the First World War and the Second World War, that gives you a kind of ghost play before you started.

That your play is in conversation with or is in reaction to or how do you think of that ghost play as compared to the real play as it ended up manifesting? The ghost play is a kind of atmosphere. You have a sense of what you yourself might work with and use if you're writing about a certain period in a certain place with a distinctive character. There is a ghost play but it's not a complete play as regards its structure and its plot. You're trying to find out about that while you're writing it. You really are not following any kind of roadmap. I used to think that that's how you did it but it doesn't work as well as leaving yourself open. I'll tell you what it's about. It's kind of like being your own audience and wanting to surprise yourself.

It's not just developing in a way that the other shoe might drop. It's the wine of life to be writing something creative. In my case, probably a play. It's the best part of life. You're living on a different level. You just take it to bed with you and you wake up with it. I recommend it, by the way.

[16:09] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Tom right after the break.

[16:19] Tom Stoppard: You mentioned things that arrive during the process of writing, the kind of surprises or the gifts that come. Is there one in particular that you can tell us about with Leopoldstadt? I bet there are two or three answers on the postcard, please. Well, I'll tell you, I didn't put the plays in five acts. No, four periods. I didn't put a lot of the characters into each one. I'd sort of leave characters out and just use the ones who were, as it were, the minimum number to carry me through. And then, once the play was sort of finished, but not exactly, I was being encouraged by Patrick, first of all, to bring back characters. It's not quite answering your question in a way that I would have liked, but that was a gift to be told, look, I liked her and I really would like her back, even if you don't know what function she or he plays.

I don't remember ever being actually in a situation where I was so suggestible and willing to take on board other people's sense of the play. When Leopoldstadt premiered in London, even at that time, anti-Semitism was returning to prominence in ways that the world, kind of like the family depicted in your play, just can't ignore anymore. And that trend has only continued in the years since then. And even now, just recently, anti-Semitism showed its ugly face here on Broadway. There were reports of neo-Nazis demonstrating at the first preview of the musical Parade. And so I wonder if you could just tell us a little about the ways in which you think of Leopoldstadt kind of engaging with the forces of anti-Semitism sort of right now. What are the ways basically in which a play can be political?

[18:43] Tom Stoppard: Yes, that's a really deep, wide question. And I don't actually, first of all, I don't quite know why anti-Semitism suddenly seemed to have a bigger profile, first of all, in London, where there was quite a long-standing fuss about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. And then we got here, and it seemed almost coincidental that the question of anti-Semitism became much more of a live question. My impression is and was that it was a coincidence. We didn't seem to have any agency about it. But on the other hand, well, the audience brings with it whatever's in the media and in the air, I guess. Naturally, one would expect that. Nothing, to my knowledge, has ever been voiced against the play or the actors.

If it's happened, it's happened without my being told about it. I think the thing to remember is that theatre is so much a storytelling form that if you're telling a story, the story has its own kind of paradigms. A story is kind of like it's innocent. It may be about innocence, it may be about something else, it may be about something else. A story is kind of like it's innocent. It may be about ogres or giant killers or whatever, but it's the telling that is the art form, not the factual content. So, I think, I hope this isn't presumptuous to say this, but it's as though the audience out there understand that they've arrived at a place where artists are at work, not polemicists. There are certainly plays which blur that boundary because it's not really supposed to be a boundary.

There are many people in my world who think that, in a sense, drama has a duty to be political, using the word in the broadest way. I've never felt that plays had a duty to be political or indeed to be anything much except to honour the story they're trying to tell and to tell the story as well as it's possible to tell it. I'm quite conservative about theatre in that respect and I always have been. I think of theatre as being a very, very valuable form of recreation.

[22:12] Tom Stoppard: Even when, you know, you might be going to a tragedy, whether it's Hamlet or Oedipus Rex or a contemporary tragedy. So, when I say recreation, I don't mean escapism or entertainment. I mean it's the recreational part of being a citizen and theatre, as a phenomenon, has lasted a very, very long time. I've lived through periods where the death of live theatre is being announced. Anybody who's my age remembers how television was going to change people's habits and so on. I think theatre does change over the years. We're getting into areas which are very far outside your question, but it's noteworthy at the moment that there are very few plays which are not musicals in New York. Very few. I think that's a pity because I grew up with the idea that London and New York and pretty much everywhere else, they existed in a sense to celebrate the writer.

And there always used to be 20 straight plays and four musicals in London, something like that. And now it's the other way around. And goodness knows what the proportions are on Broadway. I would guess there are probably 20 musicals for each play. And what is this about? Well, I'm trying to come clean with the reason for answering in these terms as though the book was a play.

[24:39] Tom Stoppard: I think of theatre as though theatre exists to fulfill the wildest dreams of the writer rather than of the actor or of the composer. And that's okay with me because our theatre in the English language goes back a few centuries and its history predates the very conception of musicals. So I think I'm talking around the fact that I'm no good at musicals so I don't see why there should be so many of them. I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to write one but I do admire the ones I see mostly.

[25:53] Gordon Cox: Tell us a little bit about why that scope was important to you in terms of how you told that story. I'm sure there's another version of this play that could have an eight-actor cast of double casting or triple casting or whatever. What felt integral to your story that it have the kind of scope and sweep that it does?

[26:12] Tom Stoppard: What I actually have was that I was given an opportunity to write pretty much anything I liked without having to be too aware of the constraints. This was because, and you'd have to ask her, but Sonia Friedman, who is the producer of Leopoldstadt, she asked me to write a play and she made it clear that I could do it without constraint and just worry about it later. So I did. It wasn't honestly that I set out thinking that this play I'm now going to try to write requires a very broad canvas with dozens of characters and so on. It's just that I was free of inhibitions and I don't think the situation is quite as awful as you thought. I don't think it's 40. It might be, I think there's 30 actors.

But then there are kids. Yeah, no, I think I was just, I was adding all that. And you have to have two of course for each character. In London, it was three, by the way. So in London, there were like 18 little children backstage on certain days. Look, being allowed all these characters makes it a bit easier to deal with the structure, I would have thought. You're trying to tell the story of this family over these years with, let's say, only eight actors instead of 28. You probably have to be cleverer and more discriminating. But I find it's just the sight of them on stage, I find it so moving to think that this form of theatre is, I'm touching wood here, is alive and well, at least occasionally and in certain parts of the landscape. I don't think it's as alive and well as it used to be when I was young.

[28:45] Gordon Cox: When you write, how do you think about the feeling or the experience that you want the audience to have had by the end of that play? How is your writing process in conversation with the ways in which you hope or intend an audience to experience the story that you're telling?

[29:09] Tom Stoppard: Well, I've got to work out an answer just as you do because it's not something which is determining my writing. The profoundest sense I've always had is that the audience owes you nothing. They volunteered to be here in this big room and paid for the privilege. They volunteered to be here. And the thing is that they're free to leave anytime they like. And this is what I meant about being a storytelling art form. I remember seeing a professional storyteller once in Iraq. It was so long ago. It was called Persia in Iran. And I listened to a small, proud collective around the storyteller. And I very quickly understood that they all knew the story. And it struck me as quite a kind of significant perception for me that it wasn't a kind of story as a revelation.

It was storytelling as confirmation. So, you've tempted all these people to come to the theater and you start telling this story. Of course, they don't know the story in a certain sense. They're not familiar with the details. But as things develop, the story begins to be known in a very curious sense. It becomes a reflection of life outside, life that you live. So, it takes on a kind of shape and a future which might be confirmed or you might be disappointed. But it takes on a kind of shape which is to do with here's a story. I'm kind of babbling now, aren't I? Let me tell you one thing then. So, just to stop myself babbling. In my play, Leopoldstadt, I would like to say, this might be surprising.

So, I'll just put in parentheses that although it's ultimately about kind of like the worst, awful subject that there is, the Holocaust, but the entire play is not about that. The play starts much, much earlier in history and people are having a kind of family nice time and so forth. But just to try to explain the answer to you, that question you asked. So, there's a woman who has an adulterous affair at a certain moment. And I wonder whether this makes me sound rather cynical. I don't think it's cynical, but what actually happens is you get to the end of the scene before that and you think, well, you know, I'm the audience. How can I ambush them? You have to ambush them, not just fulfill an expectation.

So, at that point, I decided she was going to actually be an adulteress. It sounds terrible to even say it like that. I'm trying to explain something, which probably I should keep as a kind of secret, which is that there's a very pragmatic, empirical, objectifying way of doing art. It isn't just about going into a trance and emerging with the truth you weren't aware of. There's something empirical about it, something slightly cold-blooded about it. You're manipulating the people you've created. And at the same time, you're kind of using and converging on deeply emotional truths, which are then being, are they being served by the manipulation or are they determining the manipulation? And finally, is it manipulation if there's only one possible way this thing can go at this moment?

In other words, the whole business of, first of all, being a playwright, but actually being an artist, I think is too deep and difficult to satisfactorily dispose of in any kind of interview, even one as generous as this one. If I sat down to write my answers, they would be very long because they would qualify themselves as I went along.

[34:51] Gordon Cox: You have said in the past that Leopoldstadt may be your last play. It sounds like maybe you're now reconsidering. What's the status of how you're thinking about Leopoldstadt and whatever work?

[35:03] Tom Stoppard: Reconsidering is not the word I would use. I am driving myself daft and furious and upset because I can't find the play I want to write. I definitely want to. I'm a much happier person if I'm writing. And for the last several months, I've been failing despite a very conscious, self-conscious attempt to find a play to write. Don't send me one that never works.

[35:41] Gordon Cox: Well, we will look forward to seeing what comes next from you once you find it and then write it. And we hope enjoy your visit here in New York this time around. And I imagine you will be back in July, if not before. Thank you very much for a nice conversation.

[36:03] Tom Stoppard: That's why you're here. Thanks so much, Tom. Great to talk to you. Thank you. Bye-bye.