Eddie Jaku’s best selling memoir THE HAPPIEST MAN ON EARTH was published when he was 99 years old whilst he was residing in a well known Sydney nursing home. Two years later, at the grand age of 101, he passed.
Since his passing, renowned British playwright Mark St Germain adapted his memoir for the stage, and productions of the play have already taken place in America and England. Now it is Sydney’s turn with this current production at the Sydney Opera House.
I thought that St Germain’s transference from the page to the stage worked well. My only reservation was that it didn’t cover Jaku’s long period working at the Jewish Museum, educating school students with his own personal experiences of this very dark period in. human history.
The show’s tone is set right from the beginning. An actor is standing to the right and side of the stage, and is listening as the traditional voice-over from the Opera House is heard over the speakers giving an acknowledgment of country, reminding us that these stories at the Opera House are being told on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.
Once the announcement has been completed, the actor Anton Berezin shakes hands with people in the front row, affably introducing himself to them and the audience at large as Eddie Jaku.
Jaku comes on stage and for the next 80 minutes or so tells us his story. We learn that he was born in Leipzig and very proud to have been born in such a cultured country, the land of Johann Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and many more great artists.
His buoyant attitude soon changes. He is expelled from school for being Jewish, with his parents arranging for him to leave home and enlist him in another school and feign not being Jewish. Then there’s Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass where his family’s home and many others are ransacked and people are taken away by the Nazis.
Jaku continues wth his story, telling us of his experiences in concentration camps where his parents and many in his family perished. He tells us that the only reason he survived is that with his skills as a workman and as an engineer. The Nazis found him useful, his work could benefit them, and thus he was kept alive.
The Nazis had the slogan ‘work will make you free’ written above the entrance to the camps. How sinister and sadistic. These were the very camps that Jewish people on mass were gassed and cremated with ashes and smoke pouring out from the chimneys.
Miraculously Jaku survives the war, and went on to turn his life around. Whilst others, after living through such atrocities, lost their will to live and took their own lives, Jaku overcame there feelings and his heart, proving to be ‘a very resilient muscle’ and he fell in love with a beautiful local young woman. They emigrated to Australia, a country which they took to straight away, following on from which they made a family, who then went on to make further families. As well Jaku established a very successful business career.
Berezin’s performance takes place within a very well conceived stage world. This was led by assured, astute direction by his wife, Theresa Borg, a very functional set and props by Sophie Woodward and Jacob Battista, lighting design by Finnegan Comie-Harvey, and makeup design by Fiona Cooper-Sutherland and wig design by Kylie Clarke to make Berezin, a relatively young actor, convincingly appear as the elderly Jakur.
This was a very poignant production charting the remarkable transformation of a man who weighed just 28 kilograms when he was liberated from Auschwitz, after surviving the death march, typhoid and cholera to somehow leaving all the horror behind, moving to Australia, creating a whole new life, and to say, late in his life, ‘I am the happiest man on. earth’. Extraordinary
Recommended, this was a production by Monstrous Theatre, Neil Gooding Production and the Shalom Collective, THE HAPPIEST MAN ON EARTH, stage adaptation by Mark St Germain from Eddie Jaku’s memoir, is playing the Playhouse at the Sydney Opera House until the 17th May 2026.
Production production by David Hooley
