Screening on Tuesday, February 16 at 6pm, our first OnScreen film for 2022 is Leopoldstadt (pictured), the critically acclaimed new work from internationally lauded playwright Tom Stoppard. Regarded as 'Britain's greatest living playwright' (Times), Tony and Academy award-winner Leopoldstadt is a passionate drama of love, family and endurance.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, Austria. But Hermann Merz, a factory owner and baptised Jew now married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. We follow his family's story across half a century, passing through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

A company of 40 actors represent each generation of the family in this epic, but intimate play.

Central to the play is the sprawling, extended Merz family, who are Jewish intellectuals, living in the tumultuous first half of the 20^th century. When we first meet them, in 1899, they're free citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a place where Jews have been legally emancipated for over a century.

Leopoldstadt itself was once Vienna's ghetto - now just a distant folk memory of a less enlightened age. By the final scene, set in 1955, this huge family has been mostly eradicated.

Though fictional, it's based on autobiography: Stoppard only discovered late in life that his own family was Jewish, and that that was why they'd fled Hitler's advance into their native Czechoslovakia.

His mother had kept him in the dark for decades about his heritage, reasoning that this would protect him if the dark times returned... but history catches up with you, as Stoppard's stand-in character Leo discovers in the final scene.

Leopoldstadt examines what it means to be Jewish, ethnically, spiritually, in the eyes of one's own community and in the eyes of others.

Movingly focussing on the fragility of human society, it deliberately challenges fixed ideas about what life must have been like for Jewish people in this era.

Filmed live on stage in London's West End, 'Tom Stoppard's masterpiece is magnificent' (Independent) and should not be missed.

Bookings for this brilliant OnScreen film can been made through our Box Office (ph 5492 5466) Tuesday to Friday between 10am and 1 pm or online at theMEC.com.au.