The Happiest Man on Earth
Rating: ★★★★★
Venue: Southwark Playhouse Borough, London
Cast: Kenneth Tigar 

Born in Leipzig, Germany, Eddie Jaku was a teenager when he was rounded up and sent to a concentration camp.

Overwhelmingly grateful to make it through seven years of horrors, he made a promise to smile every day in thanks for the precious gift of life. At 100 years old, he considers himself the Happiest Man on Earth.

Eddie Jaku, the self-proclaimed ‘happiest man on earth’, wrote his memoir of the same name in 2020 at 100 years of age. He passed away a year and a half later and now Mark St Germain has taken on the responsibility of sharing his story with the world by crafting his book into a one-man play.

The production begins with Eddie (Kenneth Tigar) entering the space and interacting with audience members. He shares that he has promised his son that he will speak at his synagogue but truly isn’t sure if he is able to share his story, although as we are very quickly reminded this is not a ‘story’. This is a true honest account of Eddie‘s life, the atrocities that he witnessed, and how despite it all, he kept smiling.

This show and Eddie’s life experiences are the epitome of the sliding door effect. Every single moment in Eddie’s life leads him to exactly where he ends up and many of those moments were absolutely crucial to his survival.

When Hitler rose to power, Eddie suddenly found himself expelled from his school for being Jewish. His father promised he would get an education and sent him away to a technological school in Belgium under the identity of a missing German child. He was unable to contact his own family for four and a half years as it would be a risk to everyone’s safety. After graduating he travelled home to reunite with his parents, a decision that haunted him every day for the rest of his life. The day he arrived home in Germany was the 9th November 1938, a night that went down in history known as Kristallnacht or The Night Of The Broken Glass. Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues around Germany were looted and vandalised and thousands of Jewish people were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. Eddie was dragged from his bed and ‘beaten until [his] pyjamas dripped with blood’, and then pulled away from his parents and sent to a work camp. 

This was only the very start of the horrors Eddie would experience over the next seven years. He slipped from the grips of the Nazis on more than three occasions, even managing to escape from the largest and most deadly concentration camp, Auschwitz, twice; as well as being pulled out from the gas chambers at the last minute on three separate occasions due to his engineering skills making him ‘indispensable’ to the Nazis.

There is no spectacle here. Every moment of the show is stripped back, raw honest truth demonstrated through many heart-breaking recollections, such as the moment Eddie discovered that his parents had been killed and his subsequent plea to the audience to go home and tell their parents they love them if they can, ‘for those of us that can’t anymore’.

Perhaps most harrowing, Eddie’s recollection of the moment that sees him escape from Auschwitz through a fantastically clever plan and the kindness of a stranger, only to realise that he would meet an even worst fate outside, and he took himself back and snuck back inside Auschwitz. We can probably count on two hands the number of people that ever successfully escaped Auschwitz, having the opportunity for freedom and realising he would be no more free outside than inside the camp, is a realisation that doesn’t even bear thinking about for those of us that will never have to face such a decision.

As we know the arts are such an important medium in keeping history alive and this play is a beautiful tribute to Eddie‘s life and a really gorgeous way of keeping his name and life experiences alive and making sure that people continue to hear and share them. As a Jew, it is a true honour and a privilege to witness Eddie’s life through the magic of theatre, especially in a world where my experience of racism and hatred is almost a daily occurrence.

It is absolutely essential that everybody watches this show, to keep Eddie’s beautiful spirit alive and make sure that his experiences continue to live on in the ongoing battle against hate and discrimination.

“It is our duty as a nation and as humans, to keep the memory alive and make sure that history does not repeat itself. Never forget, and never again”.

You can book tickets to The Happiest Man on Earth, here.

Review by Rachel

**photo credit: Daniel Rader**