It must be a nightmare. You’re invited to discuss your distinguished acting career, but the interviewer keeps asking about your dad. It should rankle but Ed Stoppard responds with good grace. After all, he’s rehearsing a new play by his father. I apologise for banging on about Sir Tom. My excuse is that Ed is central to the vast ensemble in Leopoldstadt, the 82-year-old Tom’s achingly poignant piece tracing a Jewish Viennese family during the first half of the 20th century.
We’re nestled in a svelte anteroom at Wyndham’s theatre in London. Stoppard, with the hollow, knobbled face of a romantic poet, describes his character, Ludwig, a mathematician and diffident head of the cultured, apparently assimilated family: “[He’s] a kind soul. But so much of his brain capacity is taken up with his work – it gives him some social blindspots. He has this nice line: ‘Mathematics is the only language in which you can make yourself clear, I find.’ That’s a helpful note from the author.”
His verbal dexterity and gift for infusing complex ideas with tenderness seem ideally suited to his father’s work, but this is only their second professional encounter (following a West End revival of Arcadia in 2009). Oddly, both characters are mathematicians (“I like playing characters whose heads are busier than most”), though his A at maths A-level only goes so far. “When I looked into number theory – which Ludwig is studying – it was completely baffling.” More pertinent is Ludwig’s passionate curiosity. “There’s probably a part of my dad’s brain that is interested in the actual mathematics,” he suggests, “but what probably interests him as much if not more is the emotion it arouses in its practitioners.”
Does he hear his father’s voice in the writing? “It’s not exactly the same, but there is a rhythm and cadence, maybe sometimes even an emphasis.” He admires its stealthy craft, too. “I’m sure I’ve heard him use the phrase ‘lobbing grenades’ at the audience – they don’t see them arcing through the air until they explode at their feet.” He laughs when he recalls an actor who checked with Tom whether he was supposed to make a particular line funny, only to be told, “Don’t worry, I’ve done it for you.” Ed reflects: “If you could only give one note to actors doing a Tom Stoppard play, that wouldn’t be a bad one.”
Fingers raking his salt-and-pepper beard, he confides: “Listen, the truth is I don’t find it very easy, my job. I’m very self-critical.” He had admiring reviews for his Hamlet in 2005 and The Glass Menagerie, alongside Jessica Lange, in 2007 – plus The Pianist and Upstairs Downstairs on screen – but perhaps imposter syndrome still lurks. Has that surname been a blessing or burden? “It was an albatross for me, which ties into beating myself up.” He recalls a director wondering, mid-filming, if Ed’s dad might “just cast an eye over the script” and admits: “It didn’t help that for years I would walk on to film sets and people would call me Tom. Initially I found it excruciating. Now I roll my eyes.”
In childhood, his first name was the curse. Ed is short for Edmund – he was named, he tells me, because his pregnant mother (doctor and TV presenter Miriam Stoppard) noticed the poet and critic Edmund Gosse’s name on the spine of a book. When did he truncate to Ed? “Oh my God, when I was like five. As young as I dared. I didn’t want to be in any way exotic at school.” Later he fleetingly dreamed of recasting that surname for professional purposes. “There was about a day and a half where I thought: Ed Straussler. That’s a pretty fucking good name.” It was his Czech grandfather’s surname.
With a cast of more than 40 in Leopoldstadt, rehearsals have been busy. The playwright is a benign presence, “backward about coming forward” and only offering suggestions apologetically. “Patrick [Marber, the director] understood that, even with six weeks’ rehearsal, we were going to need every hour,” Stoppard says. “However, he has instituted a fabulous regime of lectures.” Marber allotted everyone a relevant subject, from prostitution to Austrian Marxism. Stoppard, in character, described the historical figures Ludwig encountered, including Freud and Schnitzler. “It’s lovely. I wish we always did it.”
Research could start closer to home – there are, Stoppard admits, “resonances” with his forebears. Czech rather than Austrian Jews, the Strausslers fled just as Hitler invaded. “For people who know my dad’s biography, there’ll be one character where they’ll go, ‘Ah, there’s the author.’ My dad is quite insistent that it’s not. But it sort of is though, isn’t it?”
Tom has also resisted being described as a Jewish playwright. Does his son feel like a Jewish actor – especially in this play? He exhales a perplexed snuffle. “It’s a good question, and one I haven’t asked myself. I would be lying if I identified myself as Jewish, day-to-day. I was brought up in a completely secular household – although my mother’s parents, who were very observant, came to live next door when I was about seven or eight.”
He gets muddled about whether they held the sabbath meal on Friday or Saturday evenings and barks with frustrated laughter. “Jesus! There you go, that tells you all you need to know. I am a terrible, terrible Jew. But doing this play, I’ve never felt more connected to my heritage.”
• Leopoldstadt is at Wyndham’s theatre, London, until 13 June.
