James Walton

How can anyone resist The Piano?

Plus: a thoughtful and surefooted new Holocaust drama that restores its sheer unimaginability

Claudia Winkleman with Ellis – who performed Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 with great tenderness and skill – on Channel 4's The Piano 
issue 04 May 2024

One challenge facing any novel, drama or film about the Holocaust is to restore its sheer unimaginability. In Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark – filmed, of course, as Schindler’s List – when news reaches Krakow of what’s happening in Auschwitz, Keneally pauses for some editorialising. ‘To write these things now,’ he says, ‘is to state the commonplaces of history.

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