Any suggestion that Tom Stoppard is incapable of writing from the heart will not survive an encounter with Leopoldstadt (at the Longacre Theatre through March 12), his most emotionally gripping and perhaps most personal play. Now eighty-five, Stoppard has given us a magnificent career capstone while proving that he is even at this advanced age able to head in surprising new directions. Some of the old Stoppardian wordplay is present, as well as some banter about high-level mathematics, but the play’s immense emotional impact is in Stoppard’s consideration of what it means to be Jewish—the proud legacy, the unbearable sorrow. In a way, Stoppard (who inserts himself into the final scene of the play, all but undisguised) is castigating himself for not devoting much thought to the question until the latter stages of his life.

Born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and having fled in 1939 to the Far East, where he lost his father, and then to India, where he, his brother, and their mother fell under the care of an English officer, Major Ken Stoppard, the playwright simply never had to consider his Jewishness while growing up. He traded his central European accent for an English one as a boy and took considerable pleasure in being English. His many larkish and cerebral plays were advertisements of his sunny personality.