The twentieth century? You can find it all in Tom Stoppard’s theater

“Leopoldstadt” is staged on Broadway, stories of Viennese Jews who are a bit like the biography of the brilliant author. One of those stories told hundreds of times, and woe to stop doing it. Gore Vidal delivered the Golden Lion to Stoppard in 1990 and said, “The beauty of his language is miraculous”

“It’s a story told hundreds of times.” The gentleman who came out of the Longacre Theater with me takes his wife’s arm (friend, girlfriend, sister…). He doesn’t say it in an annoyed tone. We have just re-emerged from two hours into the short century. Something made us rethink Israel Singer, something else Anne Frank, something else Stefan Zweig. Especially to Stefan Zweig. In a lecture in Oxford, a few years ago, Tom Stoppard talked about his liberation from the ghosts of literature. He begins to be a journalist at seventeen (“newspapers are human nature given to the press”, Max will say in Rock ‘n’ Roll), but at twenty-one he gets it into his head that he wants to write more durable material. And in the England of those years this meant for him: theater. When success comes (almost immediately), it makes him feel that his dialogues become books, he is thrilled to see the cover proof of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. “When you write a play, you are serenely self-sufficient, as if you were writing a sonnet.” He learns it over time: a volume with the name of Samuel Beckett on the cover resembles another with the name of Tolstoy, but it only resembles him. Where on the one hand there is a complete story, concluded, precisely already written, on the other there is the anticipation of an event that has yet to happen.