The Happiest Man On Earth review: ‘epic yet intimate’

The Happiest Man On Earth

Southwark Playhouse | ★★★★✩

This year two elderly men have each held London theatre audiences transfixed as they relate their experience of the Holocaust. The first was Tom Dugan’s one-man show about Simon Wiesenthal in which Christopher Gibbs played the Nazi hunter. The second is this adaptation of Eddie Jaku’s memoir, another solo show adapted by Mark St. Germain, which relates the author’s harrowing experience of Nazi atrocity and also the indomitable love of life that led him to survive.

To be clear this fathom-deep love is not what protected him from the Nazis. There were plenty among the six million – or indeed 12 million to include the Nazi’s non-Jewish victims – whose love of life was equal to Jaku’s. No. What Jaku’s love of life allowed him to survive was life after the Nazis.

Performed with zest, conviviality and above all humility by the American actor and director Kenneth Tigar, this lesson arrives late in this epic yet intimate tale. You could put a pin in the show’s 90 minutes and alight on a moment that is as harrowing as it is gripping. One such is when the teenage Jaku escaped Auschwitz only to return when he found that Polish antisemitism was as murderous as his captors’.

Fleeting moments of humanity were as essential to his survival as whatever morsel of food he found. That and his talent for engineering, which made him an “economically indispensable Jew” in the camps. This was why he was plucked from the gas chambers no less than three times by guards.

With the play arriving at a time when language has been distorted beyond recognition there may be some in the audience who discover what the word genocide actually means.