Fragments, Loss, and Language: On the Jewishness of Pinter and Stoppard

AMERICAN THEATRE: If finding a playwright’s “voice” is a key to realizing their work onstage, a crucial aspect of both Pinter’s and Stoppard’s life histories is that both are Jewish. Not only Jewish, but Central European Jews who came of age in the traumatic period of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This salient fact has begun to be more deeply explored in recent years; for me, the “Jewish thread” has consistently informed my own understanding about, and interpretation of, their work. In the New York theatre, where Judaism is pervasive, the fact that these two major figures happened to be Jewish may seem inconsequential.