Leopoldstadt - Wyndham's / Cinema Screening

Fairly recently I saw him in the audience at a cosmology lecture and after he took the same tube as me but got off at Ladbroke Grove.

Is that more noteworthy ?

Sending a bit of board love. Ienjoyed the chat, jek, and enjoyed hearing that you saw him...I saw him once and it brought it back to me. X

Just to add - there’s an interesting interview with Ed Stoppard on The Guardian website under the culture section.

Well, if nothing else this proves the commercial theatre can still put on a big production of a new play with a huge cast. Well done Sonia Friedman Productions for matching commercial ambition with the vision to see that serious drama can have a significant audience too.

Glad to say Tom Stoppard continues to write well and meaningfully. This is not an old man's play, perhaps the smoking is keeping his mind sharp. This sits well within his oeuvre and is certainly much more accessible than his previous work, the intellectually ambitious but dramatically unengaging "The Hard Problem".

This is an autobiographical work, the names have been changed as have some of the circumstances, but the heart of the story is the story of what happened to Tom Stoppard and his family.

Set in Vienna in five different time periods from 1899 to 1955 the extended Merz and Jakobovicz families are well-to-do, cultured, successful middle-class Austrians. But they are also Jewish, even if some of them are baptised, they intermarry with other religions and lead a pretty secular lifestyle. This assimilation is not enough to protect them from the anti-Semitism which increases after the First World War, from the casual prejudice which might have existed in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the full-blown exterminations which result from Austria's (fairly willing) assimilation into Nazi Germany. The detail of how this family suffers is best seen in action.

It is indeed odd for the second half of a performance to be longer than the first half these days. Tonight the audience was not confused by the ending and it is indeed difficult to keep up with who all the many characters introduced in the early 1899/1900 sections are, let alone how they age, but this is not really that important. It is the sense of family that matters, of the whole rather than the parts.

Slick production, good acting and direction. Not a lot wrong with this.

Apparently Tom Stoppard only found out about his Jewish family in his fifties so this play feels like a catharsis on the playwright's part but also a personal statement of bearing witness, pertinent directly this week (International Holocaust Remembrance Day) but also a living issue in the recent and current politics of this country.

I know what you mean about just wanting to strike up a conversation, make contact. Please keep the faith. Tbh it tends to annoy me when I see older people smoking! How dare they be so healthy. That kind of thing. I don’t think smoking is anything to do with being Czech as Stoppard has lived most of his life well away from his place of birth. Are you seeing the play? 

Many thanks to all for the informative reviews so far.
Looking for seat advice for a March visit.
Need an aisle seat in the stalls and my options are row A
stage left or either aisle seat in Row L.
Thank you in advance.

Not sure which of these is best, but if you need an aisle seat for legroom reasons, you could also look at row Q which has a wide walkway between it and the row in front, and the two middle seats in row R which have nothing in front of them.

Is it worth getting a programme for some more explanation?

WHERE

IS

PARSLEY?

I think in that case you are definitely better off in L than A as the aisle seats in row A are I think close to the corner of the stage so you could feel hemmed in.

Oh my. I generally got confused when there’s a need to distinguish 5-6 people but with the cast this large I’d be completely lost..
Can somebody be so kind to post pics with the family tree & cast (if such thing is allowed in here)? Would be most helpful for us, who are yet to see the play so we won’t go through the pages during the action on stage)