Sonia Friedman Productions announces final casting for the world premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt to be directed by Patrick Marber.
Now booking to 13 June 2020, Leopoldstadt begins previews at Wyndham’s Theatre on 25 January 2020.
Faye Castelow, Felicity Davidson, Avye Leventis and Sadie Shimmin join the previously announced adult cast – Sebastian Armesto, Jenna Augen, Rhys Bailey, Joe Coen, Mark Edel-Hunt, Clara Francis, Ilan Galkoff, Caroline Gruber, Sam Hoare, Natalie Law, Noof McEwan, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Jake Neads, Aaron Neil, Alexander Newland, Yasmin Paige, Adrian Scarborough, Griffin Stevens, Ed Stoppard, Luke Thallon, Eleanor Wyld and Alexis Zegerman.
Jarlan Bogolubov, Ramsay Robertson and Joshua Schneider join the previously announced children’s cast – Toby Cohen, Zachary Cohen, Olivia Festinger, Tamar Laniado, Maya Larholm, Daniel Lawson, Louis Levy, Libby Lewis, Jack Meredith, Chloe Raphael, Beatrice Rapstone and Montague Rapstone comprising three sets of five children.
Vienna in 1900 was the most vibrant city in Europe, humming with artistic and intellectual excitement and a genius for enjoying life. A tenth of the population were Jews. A generation earlier they had been granted full civil rights by the Emperor, Franz Josef. Consequently, hundreds of thousands fled from the Pale and the pogroms in the East and many found sanctuary in the crowded tenements of the old Jewish quarter, Leopoldstadt.
Tom Stoppard’s new play, directed by Patrick Marber, is an intimate drama with an epic sweep; the story of a family who made good. “My grandfather wore a caftan,” says Hermann, a factory owner, “my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner.” It was not to last. Over the next fifty years this family, like millions of others, was to re-discover what it meant to be Jewish in the first half of the 20th century. Leopoldstadt is a passionate drama of love, endurance and loss. It is Stoppard’s most humane and heart-breaking play.
Leopoldstadt, the sixth collaboration between SFP and Tom Stoppard, reunites Stoppard, Marber and Friedman who last collaborated on Travesties in 2017.