This Is the Promised Land

Leopolstadt is Stoppard’s most sustained engagement with his own family’s history of upheaval and erasure at the hands of the Nazis, his effort to write in all the names and tell the story of his family and his people. Stoppard’s work to date has long been concerned with questions of politics and history, whether in The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy dramatizing 19th-century Russia and the period leading up to the emancipation of the country’s 23 million serfs, or in his numerous histories of anti-Soviet resistance during the Cold War, from Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) to Rock ’n’ Roll (2006).