Leopolsdstadt boasts a very tightly composed script – even by Stoppard’s standards. Above all it is a relentless questioning and affirmation.Ĭonsisting of several crescendoed themes and phrases from Stoppard’s corpus, Leopoldstadt is relentlessly epic in scope, ambition and proportions.” It is a relentless reminder of our fragility and brutality, our innocence and darker instincts, a relentless exposition on the condition of apartness and belonging. It is a relentless plea to our conscience and consciousness a relentless probing of our humanity or lack of it an equally relentless foray into remembrance and the politics of oblivion, guilt and innocence, horrendous crime and eschewed expiation. ![]() Tom (Tomáš/Tomik) Straussler Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt is unflinchingly relentless. And for this total experience, one word applies: relentlessness. He seeks to restore the presence of absence, to decipher the palimpsest of multiple erasures. In seeking to give expression to such presumed singularities, Stoppard gives expression to the wholeness and totality of our psychosynthesis as a species, our collective psyche, the trajectory of humankind through time. Tom Stoppard’s new, and, as he affirms, last play, Leopoldstadt, currently at Wyndham’s Theatre, seeks to find the words, the silences, the screams of reason or the irrational, to articulate the experiences of one Jewish family, the Merz-Jakobowiczes, one Austrian city, Vienna, one people, the Jews of Europe, one sociohistorical phenomenon, antisemitism, one historical horror, the Holocaust. ![]() In Adorno’s much used (and misused) own words, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” the human soul and mind can conceive of no recreation of experience, no seamless relating to, or of, life through words alone, once the humanity of meaning has been so viciously aggressed and perhaps lost. Sometimes it is very hard to put words to experiences.
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