This play is both a historical and philosophical drama as well as a highly personal challenge from Stoppard, who didn't discover that he was Jewish until his 50s when a distant cousin got in touch with him. The author appears to make up for lost time with Leopoldstadt, a first-rate, epic, and impassioned declaration of his own origins. He asserts that forgetting one's forefathers is tragic in and of itself. To lose your name in a family album, as one character puts it, "is like a second death."

It is yet another play by Tom Stoppard that impressed me with its erudition and singular structure. But there was an undercurrent of emotion that built over the length of reading the play that overwhelmed me by the final scene. So many of the family members had succumbed to tragic ends over the course of the family history that there was a nostalgia of lives lived that was was dressed in the end with widows' weeds of death. ( )

Playtext for this late-era Stoppard portrayal of a family through the various upheavals of Vienna, a generation or two back. Family lore is typically charming or engaging, and here is made poignant by the tragic history of Mitteleuropa Jewry, and of Stoppard’s personal and family heritage, which the family generations of the play here parallel. Apparently, he only pieced this family history together in his later years , and so, like the ingenuous Leo in the play, the depth of his family’s entanglement in the Holocaust, and indeed of their Jewishness, came as a surprise. To the spectator or reader now, those tragic events may be well known, but this absorbing story serves as a personalised reminder, and also draws distressing attention to the roots of that antisemitism in turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna, the comfortable and decadent society of “handsome Karl” (mayor Karl Lueger). ( )

המחזה האחרון (כנראה תרתי משמע) של תום סטופרד. מספר את סיפור המשפחה שלו בשואה ובדרך אגב את ההיסטוריה של יהודי אירופה במחצית הראשונה של המאה ועשרים. לפעמים מרתק ונוגע ללב אך לחלוטין לא נקי מחסרונות. בבחינת תפסת מרובה , לא תפסת ( )

The problem with seeing Leopoldstadt – Tom Stoppard’s most recent and probably last play – is that so much is going on, there are so many characters on stage all at once, so many words are spoken — it’s very easy to get lost. And as soon as one begins to understand who all the people are and what is going on, we jump ahead twenty years or more to the next scene. Nevertheless, the play was gripping and deeply moving. Reading the text now, after seeing it performed, added a new dimension and new understanding. This is brilliant stuff. ( )