The Happiest Man On Earth

On the run from the Nazis after having escaped from Auschwitz, Eddie Jaku was picked up by American soldiers in a delirious and malnourished state. He asked the nurse for his prognosis. She demurred, he persisted. Eventually she told him that he had cholera as well as typhoid and weighed 28 kilograms. “The odds are not good,” she said. Eddie gripped her arm and with a strangled, triumphant laugh shouted out “I have odds!”

The real-life story of the Holocaust survivor was only committed to the page a few years ago when Jaku was in his late nineties. The award-winning book The Happiest Man On Earth is now a riveting one-man play streaked with black humour, genuine optimism and a stunning lack of cynicism. As Jaku, Kenneth Tigar is pure blockbuster, by turns fiery, proud, solemn and warm as he takes on a journey through Europe, through time and (mostly) through our emotions.

There’s an automatic sympathy that comes with stories like this. The towering statistics, the heart-breaking sights and the historical and geographical impact of what the Nazis did are still ingrained into the modern psyche almost ninety years after Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist declared war on Jews (as well as the disabled, travellers and homosexuals). Jaku was born in 1920 and begins his story in his early teens soon after the Fuhrer ascends to the Reichstag. The suffering starts abruptly with social exile and, before long, Jaku’s father sends him away with a new gentile name and a mission: to avoid the oncoming storm that threatened the lives of everyone they knew.

The 82-year-old Tigar swiftly moves through the Thirties and onto the Forties, barely pausing for breath, as we bear witness to a story of how Eddie was imprisoned first in Buchenwald and, after a failed escape, Auschwitz where he comes face to face with the infamous SS physician Josef Mengele. Along the way, he is separated from his family. At one point, he asks a concentration camp officer what happened to his parents and the officer points to a cloud of smoke. “And that,” says Jaku, “is when I knew I was an orphan.” Thanks to his training as an engineer, he becomes very useful to his captors; on three separate occasions, he is saved from execution only by a last-minute recognition of his Nazi-given status as an “economically indispensable Jew”. From Brussels to Dunkirk to the south of France and back to Brussels, Tigar pushes us through this emotionally punishing but inspiring narrative at breakneck speed with occasional pauses to pass on pieces of homespun wisdom (“Family is first. Family is second. Family is last. And we are all family.”) or to lay out a particularly evocative situation.

A simple set from James Noone sees slats and lighting playing everything from schoolroom to train carriage and prison cell with sound and light designs from Brendon Anes and Harold Burgess respectively giving Tigar’s delivery real depth. Mark Jermain’s adaptation is pacy, incisive and insightful and engages the audience from the off. There’s little fat on the bone but that comes at a slight cost as we rarely get to see the inner Jaku beyond his experiences. It is only after the war that a real sense of the man emerges as he contemplates the mental cost of his travails. More of that would have helped flesh out what is ultimately a moving but never monotonous monologue.

The Happiest Man On Earth runs at Southwark Playhouse until 14 December.

Photo Credit: Daniel Rader