LONDON — Do you remember? Don’t you remember? Can’t you remember? Why can’t you remember?

Variations on those unsettling words — both explicit and unspoken — echo through the wrenching final scene of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which opened Wednesday night at Wyndham’s Theater in London. They are addressed to a mid-20th century visitor to Vienna, a youngish, defensively British man of slipping poise who appears to have forgotten most of his early childhood.

But you could also argue that these questions have been posed, in a sustained murmur, from the very beginning of this richly embroidered portrait of Jewish life in Vienna in the early 20th century. They are questions aimed directly at us, the audience and, by extension, at a wider world conveniently prone to historical amnesia.

That would include, above all, the man who wrote this play.

A tone of instructional reproach is hardly a quality associated with Stoppard, whose six-decade career embraces a host of exuberantly cerebral plays, from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1967) to the time-traveling “Arcadia” (1993). But “Leopoldstadt,” which has been polished to a burnished sheen by the director Patrick Marber, holds a singular position in its author’s canon.

For starters, Stoppard, 82, has said this will probably be his last play. And, more than anything he has written (including his rueful “The Real Thing”), “Leopoldstadt” feels like an act of personal reckoning for its creator — with who he is and what he comes from. It’s not difficult to see “Leopoldstadt” as one man’s passionate declaration of identity as a Jew.