We sat down with Nadya Menuhin, creator of a new adaptation of The Passenger, that premieres at the Finborough Theatre for a five-week limited season starting on Monday, 10 February 2025 until 15th March 2025. Get tickets here.
The Passenger is a harrowing and timely adaptation of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel. What drew you to this story, and how did you approach adapting it for the stage?
The novel follows Otto Silbermann, a German Jew as he tries to escape Nazi Germany in the wake of Kristallnacht (the coordinated wave of antisemitic violence in November 1938). It was thrilling to read, terrifying and it haunted me.
I was drawn to the psychology of the story and to the character of Otto Silbermann. The novel’s originality is in its approach to the protagonist, not as the one-dimensional victim typical of novels, but a fully formed human, a difficult father and not someone easy to warm to.
As Otto journeys on trains, in the hopes of escape, he encounters a panorama of society under the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany. This includes supporters of the regime, opportunists, people who are indifferent and then those who want to help but are themselves caught up in the machinery of the state.
There was also the consideration in writing this that a present-day audience are reading the story backwards, by that I mean, we now know what horrors came after 1938, but in 1938 it would’ve been impossible to imagine the mass murder of The Holocaust.
The adaptation I wrote is one piece of a much larger puzzle brought to life by an incredible team with Tim Supple and Joseph Alford at the helm.
The novel was written in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht and captures a sense of urgency and paranoia. How did you translate this atmosphere into a theatrical experience?
As the novel is written as a thriller, I hope the stage version comes across in these terms too.
The novel has an incredible feeling of both dizzying forward motion and a horrifying cyclicality, these two opposing forces give the book a tautness. The idea of being able to recreate this in an intimate venue like the Finborough is exciting. The unstoppable feeling of the book lent itself to one act straight through.
The novel also presents, at times with great irony, the absurdity of antisemitism and racial categorisation, I’ve tried to lean into this in the adaptation. Otto Silbermann’s identity is as a bourgeois German businessman, the fact that he is Jewish is incidental to him, but not to Nazi Germany. He is labelled a Jew by the state, his rights as a citizen are removed from him and his world collapses in a matter of days.
As a playwright making your full-length debut at the Finborough Theatre, how has your background in literary agency and your work with the Royal Court and BBC Writersroom influenced your approach to storytelling?
As an agent I represent non-British authors for the stage and in many cases this means novels and film in adaptation. Whenever I read a book or watch a film I think: “Could this story be told on stage?” Very often the answer is no, because there is a reason the work found its way into the world in its original medium. But then there are cases where the idea can have a different, but no less potent, existence on stage.
The Royal Court training was invaluable, Stef Smith, who mentored the group always spoke of a script as a blueprint, she encouraged us not to be afraid of breaking form if necessary, and to be wild and instinctive, but always with rigour, not wildness for the sake of it! The Passenger, for example is quite filmic, and it could lack a cohesion and a dramatic building of tension because the book itself is episodic. I had to find a language for it which would work on stage.
The Writersroom course was very supportive, the focus was on writing for television which is a totally different approach to story in terms of structure, I learnt a lot. I’ve got a few things simmering and I’m enjoying exploring this different form.
With its Hitchcockian tension and themes of displacement, betrayal, and survival, The Passenger resonates strongly today. What do you hope a modern audience take away from this adaptation?
Those themes will certainty resonate greatly today, the world is a different place to what it was in 1938 but human beings remain resolutely the same.
What struck me in the novel was the proximity one feels to Otto and the suddenness of the change in his circumstances. It makes me reflect on the way we cling to our civic and social identities, because they offer a sense of security and rootedness but how these can change in an instant.