‘You need to know about evil to play the Happiest Man on Earth’

It’s an actor’s dream to be able to do a part like this,” says Kenneth Tigar, the 82-year-old acting veteran whose taken on the role of Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku in the one-man play The Happiest Man on Earth.

“Obviously, the material is very deep and much of it is very dark, but it’s not a dark evening in the theatre at all.” The play, written by Mark St Germain, is based on the memoir of the same name by Jaku, who spent seven years of hell in four Nazi concentration camps, living to 101 to tell the tale.

After an acclaimed run with the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts last summer, Tigar’s solo rendition of the life story of Jaku has arrived in London, where he is delivering a 90-minute emotional tour de force to audiences at Southwark Playhouse.

“Eddie wrote a book called The Happiest Man on Earth after he’d gone through some of the worst events that you can possibly conceive. And he survived it and came out happy at the other end. That’s an incredible journey,” Tigar says at the rehearsal space near Bermondsey, where it’s a rather intimate affair between director Ron Lagomarsino, stage manager Judith Volk, and himself as the only actor in the room.

Jaku’s autobiography, published in 2020, a year before his death, is a patchwork of tolerance and forgiveness. Despite losing both his parents in the Holocaust, he went on to preach peace until his death. On reaching his centenary, he found himself overwhelmed with gratitude for life and wrote he was “the happiest man on Earth”.

For Tigar, who grew up in a Jewish family in Boston, the role is special, even personal. “We don’t know that any members of our family died in the Holocaust,” he says, but adds, “I’m sure they did.

“My great-grandparents all came over and they left brothers and sisters. I have no idea who they were – those family members that didn’t make it, they’re gone.” For that reason, he does “feel close” to the source material.

He remembers asking his maternal grandmother why she emigrated from Ukraine to the US in 1906, and her blunt response was: “Because they were killing us.”

The play follows Jaku, a Jewish boy born from Leipzig, Germany, who one day in 1938 returned from boarding school to visit his family, and found no one home.

It was November 9 – Kristallnacht – and Jaku’s parents had already gone into hiding.

At 5am, ten Nazi stormtroopers barged through the door. They killed the family dog, began to engrave a swastika into Jaku’s arm with a bayonet, and kidnapped him, taking him to Buchenwald.

Jaku spent the next seven years at a string of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He survived the war thanks to his engineering skills. His father and mother were murdered in the gas chambers.

The subject matter is heavy, but as Tigar says, the show is ultimately a celebration of survival, and a testament to how “we are lucky to be alive”, a message Jaku crystallised in his memoir.

The actor notes a moment at the end of the play, when Jaku says that he doesn’t feel a shred of hatred for anyone, even Hitler.

The same lines in the memoir read: “I do not hate anyone. Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you.”

“I thought, ‘what an extraordinary thing to say’, for someone who was tortured and who lost his entire family,” reflects Tigar. Not every actor’s oeuvre contains both the role of a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor and that of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Nazi’s SS and a chief architect of the genocide of more than six million Jews.

The range conveys Tigar’s natural gifts, though as a young man he never set out to be an actor.

“I loved it, but it was just a hobby,” he says of his experiences of drama during his school and university years. He studied German literature at Harvard University to PhD and was on track to become a professor, but acting tugged at his heart. As a student, he got “suckered” into starting up a cabaret in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which gave Jane Curtin from the original cast of Saturday Night Live her first gig.

When his girlfriend at that time got a Fulbright scholarship to Vienna, Tigar decided to join her. The two married, which was “quite nice for a while”, and he joined a German theatre company in the Austrian capital, with which he toured France.

“At the end of the year, they asked me to stay on, but my wife’s Fulbright was over, and I thought if I’m really going to do this full-time, I ought to go and do it in my own language. The Germans all thought I was Austrian, the Austrians all thought I was German, but no one knew I was an American.”

He went to New York, one thing led to another, and he “ended up in Los Angeles for 30 years”, landing movie roles in the Lethal Weapon franchise, Primal Fear, The Avengers and TV series L.A. Heat and House of Cards.

I ask Tigar if his bilingualism has served him well as an actor. “The important thing when you do any play is to understand what you’re saying, and I imagine it’s like translating,” he says. “You must understand what the words mean and ask yourself, ‘Why am I saying this?’”

Without classical theatre training, he credits his translation background for giving him the ability to inhabit a character – even those as foreign to him as the Nazi SS chief in the dystopian TV series The Man in the High Castle.

But how as an actor do you play such a man, who history remembers as a monster? For Tigar, understanding those who we call evil is a moral responsibility. “In order to get to Himmler, one has to understand what the Nazis really wanted, what they believed, how they felt,” he says.

“It’s easy for us to think about someone like Hitler as a cartoon character. We know he hated Jews and all of that, but he was a real person, and he really did these things, thought about them, believed them. And we could do it again. God knows with American politics right now; we are very close to doing that again.”

Despite this reference to Trump, Tigar is serious about keeping today’s politics out of the play and staying faithful to Jaku’s story, which at its heart has a universal message – about the sanctity of human life, our ability to violate it, and why we must never do so again.

“It has to do with people. It has to do with hatred. It has to do with people being killed and tortured for who they are. It is about a Jew. It is about antisemitism, but the same story could have been told about a Muslim or homosexual or a black person,” he says.

“We are capable of such awful things as human beings. We’ve been killing each other for millennia. It is important to tell this story in a human way so that an audience can say: ‘That’s awful.

“I don’t want to do that. We can be better as human beings.’”

At Southwark Playhouse as Jaku, Tigar will be alone on stage – accompanied only by a table, bench and chair – but through the magic of theatre they’ve managed to “create a world”, he says.

“That’s the idea. I’ve never seen the show, but I think that we’re creating a whole world.”

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‘The Happiest Man on Earth’ is showing at the Southwark Playhouse until December 14. The JC has an exclusive showing of the play on December 2 followed by a Q&A with Kenneth Tigar. For a 10% discount, book your tickets using code TJC10