Tom Stoppard said he had cried every night watching his latest play inspired by the Holocaust and his own personal history.
The playwright, 82, who fled what was Czechoslovakia in 1939 with his Jewish family, said: “I always cry, I keep thinking, I can’t keep doing this. I think it’s about the 10th time I’ve seen it.”
The prolific playwright, whose career also includes winning an Oscar for the script of Shakespeare In Love, said Leopoldstadt set in Vienna’s Jewish quarter from the turn of the 20th Century to 1955 was “a photograph of the period”. He said he set it in Austria rather than the Czech Republic “to avoid it being too autobiographical”.
Stoppard added: “Vienna was actually an attractive subject in itself because in the 19th Century and early 20th Century it was such a vital part of European culture and science.”
The playwright’s son Ed, who plays a member of the extended Jewish family almost destroyed in the Holocaust, said he tried not to “dwell” on his own family’s experience during the war.
He said: “It’s a history shared by hundreds of thousands of European Jews, if not millions, so I maybe dwelt on it a few months ago but I don’t anymore.
“But then it will sort of blindside me occasionally and something small and odd will just resonate.”
The show’s producer Sonia Friedman, who has developed some of the West End’s biggest hits including Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, said it had been “a very emotional” night.
Friedman revealed the subject matter had “unlocked” something in her and inspired her to hire a genealogist to find out exactly what happened to her own Jewish ancestors in Eastern Europe. She added: “It’s been a very moving and powerful process for me”.
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