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David Remnick: Tom Stoppard, one of the great playwrights of his generation, is somehow reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who was not born to the English language but who relishes above all the words that are his instrument and his material. Since the success of his early play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard has been celebrated both for his comic genius and the way he plays with ideas in his work. He's 85 years old, and until now, he's largely resisted the autobiographical elements in his plays. Now, in Leopoldstadt, he's made that shift.

Leopoldstadt deals with a piece of family history that seems like something from fiction. Much of Stoppard's family had been killed in the Holocaust. His mother escaped from Czechoslovakia with him and his brother, and she eventually married a British officer who brought the family to England. Stoppard is mining that history in Leopoldstadt in a way that's both personal and very large in scale, spanning 50 years, and featuring a cast of 38 actors, some who play more than one role.

Tom Stoppard: I'm lucky to be a writer. I don't want to stop being a writer. When I finished Leopoldstadt, I was really glad that there was a possibility that if I did not write another play, I was really glad about the fact that I'd finished on a big thing.

David Remnick: Tom Stoppard spoke with our contributor, Andrew Dickson, just before the play opened on Broadway.

Andrew Dickson: Do you still get those butterflies when you're waiting for an audience to come in? Do you still think about what they're going to think? How are they going to respond?

Tom Stoppard: The answer is I stopped being nervous a few plays ago. With this one, I feel, yes, a few butterflies about opening Leopoldstadt here. When we finish talking, I'll be getting back to the Longacre Theatre to sit in the auditorium, which is now absolutely packed with digital boxes of gadgetry and people, which makes you understand, putting on a play on Broadway now is a heavy-duty thing. It used to be so simple, comparatively simple. In my youth, we could do an act a day when we were at this stage of the process in technical rehearsal. I'm more nervous than I used to be because just by breathing that atmosphere, you get a sense of how high the stakes must be.

Andrew Dickson: Leopoldstadt, the play itself, is all about time. It's this journey through nearly 60 years of history from 1899 to 1955. The story of one Jewish family over several generations as they're slowly sucked into the horrors of the Holocaust. What made you want to write on that scale? It's such an enormous canvas of time.

Tom Stoppard: Well, the way you put it is as though I made the decision to write on a particular scale. It was more a case that I was writing without the usual constraints because I was given the carte blanche by Sonia Friedman to write anything I like, and she'd do everything she could possibly do to get it on.

Andrew Dickson: She's the producer, we should say.

Tom Stoppard: She's the producer of Leopoldstadt. I knew I wanted to write a bleak version of my family background. More particularly, I wanted to write about coming to England at the age of eight. I thought when I set off with the play that the second half would be set in England and would take me through the first 20 years of my life. It didn't work out like that, plays never do. They find their own architecture and their own story, even. I just went along with what I had and tried to be inventive. I ended up writing about myself in 1955, so I do get into my own play for the last 20 minutes or so.

That young man's family history is only in the broadest sense like mine. There's enough shared experience as I found as soon as the play was out there. There's enough shared experience to go around tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of families who all can say, "You're writing about my family." Of course, they know that I'm not and I know that I'm not but it's also true that, yes, I'm writing about their families too.

David Remnick: As you say, it has these fascinating autobiographical hints. I guess if anyone knows anything about your backstory that you were evacuated as it were to England or traveled to England when you were eight. You had this very, very English upbringing and this hidden history, which you only discovered in your 50s when I think a relative, a cousin of yours, got in touch and said, "Do you know what happened to your family?" She said, "Well, you're Jewish. Four of your grandparents died in the Holocaust, several of your aunts." There was this whole other history in this side to your family history and to yourself that you hadn't really known about. Is that true you had just not known it?

Tom Stoppard: Yes, it does sound pretty awful and weird as well, but I did not know it. I didn't know my mother's sisters existed. I didn't know what happened to my four grandparents, but at the same time, I could have found out if I persisted. I wasn't a complete idiot. I knew we left Czechoslovakia because of the Jewish problem or the Nazi problem, depending on where you are, and I've talked to my mother about that very occasionally. Like my mother, I was just facing forward and getting on with life. When you're 8, 9, 10 years old, whatever, you take what comes. I was at a boarding school in an |Indian hill station when I was five. My father, unknowing to me, meanwhile, being killed by the Japanese.

Andrew Dickson: Was it also that your mother didn't really want--?

Tom Stoppard: No, she really did not. She married Major Stoppard, bless her. He brought us to England. She didn't want to look back, and she didn't. She never really talked much about the past. I didn't ask many questions. Actually, come to think of it, much later on, I asked her to write down everything she could remember pretty much. I gave her a very beautiful leather-bound notebook to do it in, which she ignored.

It's misleading to see me as somebody who, blithely and innocently at the age of 40-something, thought, "Oh my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family." It's complete nonsense. Of course, I knew, but I didn't know who they were. I didn't feel I had to find out in order to live my own life, but that wasn't really true.

Andrew Dickson: When you were writing Leopoldstadt, are there things that you wish you could have asked her about it? Revisiting that history, are there questions that have come up?

Tom Stoppard: No, she wouldn't have much like me writing the play at all, I don't think. Perhaps by that time, it wouldn't matter. She died in the '90s. Up to that time, especially earlier, she really wouldn't have liked me to write about myself as somebody who's actually Czech and had relatives living in communist Czechoslovakia.

Andrew Dickson: She just didn't want to--

Tom Stoppard: She was scared of communists. She'd been scooped out of the way of Hitler and then, out of the way of the Japanese. When my father was dead, and we were still in India, I guess if she hadn't married a British Army officer, we might have gone back home, which wouldn't have been so great.

Andrew Dickson: We're talking about these autobiographical resonances in Leopoldstadt, the play. You've said in an early version of it, your original intention was actually to write yourself into the play. It sounds a little bit like you then wrote yourself out of the play because what we have right at the end, I think pretty much in the final scene, there is a character who you call Leo. He's an English writer. He writes these funny books, and he himself, it turns out, is a refugee who doesn't know anything about his history and his Jewish relatives explain it.

Tom Stoppard: No, it's brazen self-pillage. It is. There's an element of confessional about it, of course. He speaks for me, and he ends up in tears, with good reason to be in tears. I don't want to be mawkish on the radio, but I think I can say that they're my tears.

Andrew Dickson: You made the very unwise statement when someone was interviewing you about Leopoldstadt and you said it could be your last play. It made a lot of headlines. Then you said, "Actually maybe it isn't my last play. That's just how I was feeling at the time. I'm not sure I guess the question is how are you feeling now? Are you trying to write another play?

Tom Stoppard: I am and I really, really very much would like to be working on another play, because when it comes down to it, I have family to love and be loved by so it seems not the most tactful thing to say about one's work, but in a way it is one's work, which makes one's life purposive. I don't get enough energy out of being a father and a grandfather. I am a writer. I'm lucky to be a writer. I don't want to stop being a writer. When I finished Leopoldstadt, I was really glad that there was a possibility that if I did not write another play, I was really glad about the fact that I'd finished on a big thing.

It struck me as a good idea to retire at that point so I would not end up in my twilight years writing miniatures. I might not yet have escaped that fate because I'd rather write a miniature than nothing. If it turns out that my last direct and personal experience of writing plays would turn out to be sitting in the Windham Theater in London and then the Longacre Theater in New York City, sitting in those houses that had been there a long time with all kinds of work on their boards. If it turns out my last direct experience was sitting in an audience watching and listening to Leopoldstadt, that would be a fortunate destiny. I'd consider myself blessed.

Andrew Dixon: I wonder if I'd just ask you about one other thing, which is that we're talking fairly soon after the death of the Queen. It's a huge story in all sorts of ways. You met her a number of times, I think. Did you get a sense of her?

Tom Stoppard: You're right. I have met her a number of times but the person one has lost though, the loss one feels is not the loss of the person one met but the loss of the office itself. The loss of that person who represented the constitutional monarchy for the hold of my life. As we keep saying, I was eight when I got to England. I was a subject of one woman, this one monarch. The loss is real because maybe, who knows? There's all kinds of people out there, and I imagine lots of them hate the very idea of a monarchy. I've loved the monarchy as an abstract idea and I've also loved the way that this Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, comported herself and the way she took the role seriously.

Andrew Dixon: We say this about actors, don't we? The Queen really did inhabit that role.

Tom Stoppard: The whole point and purpose of a mask is that it doesn't slip. That's what it's for. She's quite aware or was quite aware of the effect she had on people who were meeting her for the first time. The commonest story there is about people who meet the Queen for the first time, is how friendly and informal the experience turned out to be.

Andrew Dixon: That was your experience as well.

Tom Stoppard: Yes.

Andrew Dixon: It's been a delight to speak, Tom. Thank you so much for the time.

Tom Stoppard: I've enjoyed myself with you, Andy. Thank you very much.

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David Remnick: Tom Stoppard's play Leopoldstadt is playing on Broadway. You can read more from Andrew Dixon's Interview with Stoppard at newyorker.com.

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