Leoplodstadt by Tom Stoppard

From Wikipedia.

Leopoldstadt is a play by Sir Tom Stoppard, which premiered on 25 January 2020 at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End. The play is set among the Jewish community of Vienna in the first half of the 20th century and follows the lives of “a prosperous Jewish family who had fled the pogroms in the East”. According to Stoppard the play “took a year to write, but the gestation was much longer. Quite a lot of it is personal to me, but I made it about a Viennese family so that it wouldn’t seem to be about me.”

The opening scene is set in 1900 but other than the dress and gadgetry available to the family, it could have been about any modern Jewish family anywhere in the West right now. The second scene is set in post-World War I Vienna in 1924 where the family is all far to the left in the manner of the 1920s. The third scene is set in November 1938 on the day of Kristallnacht. And the final scene, with virtually all of the family now dead, is set in 1955, again in Vienna. 

The best piece of theatre I have seen in many a year.

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