Tom Stoppard Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Billy Crudup has a theory about his career, and it's that he tends to get some of his best roles when he's not the director's first choice. Exhibit A: his Broadway debut as Septimus in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.

In recent interviews, the playwright Tom Stoppard has mused that his latest, Leopoldstadt, may be his last work — not because he's planning on dying anytime soon, but he writes slowly, and you just never know when you're 82. If that's the case, then this heady drama, marbled with autobiographical echoes and career-long preoccupations, will provide a rewarding seam for a final chapter exegesis in future literary biographies.

“Leopoldstadt,” the most slow-burn and personal work of 82-year-old Tom Stoppard’s long stage and screen career, is an intimate epic. It springs to astonishing dramatic life in a now bare, but once glorious apartment off Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1955. The only problem is, for all the visceral emotional intensity of that scene, it forms less than the last quarter of a play that begins, two hours earlier, at the same address in 1899.