For Stoppard, this play is a personal “coming-out.” That may be a difficult concept for some American Jews to understand, but England is not America. Leopoldstadt is not so much a narrative-drama as a painful, public process of late remembering. It often feels like watching a man performing an autopsy on himself. It is a play about what it means to be English, what it means to be Jewish, and what it means to bury the latter identity in the hope of outrunning the next European genocide. For those of us who are the offspring of similar twists of family fate, Anglo-washed by the surnames of Gentile fathers or stepfathers, these habits of suppression, easy as breathing, are resonantly familiar—seeing them staged is a punch to the gut.
Source : Tom Stoppard’s Theatre of Memory
