Posted in: TV | Tagged: broadway, Closer, Leopoldstadt, Olivier Award, Patrick Marber, stephen daldry, steven spielberg, Tom Stoppard, west end

Leopoldstadt: Tom Stoppard's Hit Play to Become Amblin TV Series

Tom Stoppard's hit play Leopoldstadt is being developed by Steven Spielberg's company Amblin into a television miniseries.

Tom Stoppard's award-winning hit West End and Broadway play Leopoldstadt is being developed into a television miniseries by Amblin, Steven Spielberg's production company. According to Deadline Hollywood, the project is currently being shopped to playwright and director Patrick Marber, best known for his play Closer, to adapt and for The Crown's Stephen Daldry to direct. Marber directed the original London production and also the current Broadway production. No deal has been signed, and no studio has picked up the project so far.

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convenes at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today's most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion."

Leopoldstadt won the 2020 Olivier Award in London. Stoppard lost all four of his grandparents in concentration camps, and it took Stoppard nearly his entire life to finally write it. It is the most personal play he has ever written and might be his final work. It is currently the frontrunner to win Best Play of the Year at the upcoming Tony Awards in June. It has already received rapturous critical praise and awards from the New York Drama League, the Outer Critics Circle, and The New York Drama Critics Circle. Even with its subject matter, the play is sprinkled with Stoppard's trademark wit and humour. Talks began on the television version before the writers' strike and should resume once it's over. Once talent is attached, it will be shopped to a broadcaster.

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