This Menuhin show is all about the words, not the music

You could be forgiven for thinking that any performance with the name Menuhin attached to it would be an evening of virtuosic musicianship. Yet it is not Nadya Menuhin’s music for which audiences are buying tickets at west London’s tiny yet powerful Finborough Theatre, but her play.

The work, which opened this week, is an adaptation of The Passenger, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered gripping German novel of 1938 that follows the fate of Berlin businessman Otto Silberman as the walls of persecution close in on him and his fellow Jews. So no Menuhin recital then.

Playwright Nadya Menuhin[Missing Credit]

“If people are out of the house I have a Yamaha upright acoustic piano and can make bad sounds,” says Nadya, 39, granddaughter of the great classical violinist Yehudi. She is almost certainly being modest about her playing ability. Yet Nadya knew from an early age that she did not want to continue in the footsteps of her world famous grandfather, nor that of her father, the pianist and composer Jeremy Menuhin.

“When I was 12 I moved in with my father and the piano was definitely his. Which is not to blame him. I just wasn’t really enjoying it,” she says when we speak online during a break in her play’s rehearsals.

When I was 12 I moved in with my father and the piano was definitely his. Which is not to blame him. I just wasn’t really enjoying it

She was 14 when Yehudi died. Many of her memories of him are set in Switzerland where he started a music festival. “I would be running around this idyllic little chalet and Grandpa would bring me my favourite foods, florentines and white nectarines. It didn’t occur to me that he was a celebrity in any way. If he had lived longer there are all sorts of things I would have loved to have spoken to him about. But to me he was just Grandpa.”

Although she has been part of the Royal Court Theatre Writers’ Group, Nadya also works as a literary agent for non-British authors whose work ends up on UK stages. “It’s all very niche,” she says, slightly self-deprecatingly even though some of the names she represents are big-hitters of the cinema such as Lars von Trier, his fellow Dogme 95 founder Thomas Vinterberg and the Swedish writer and director Ruben Östlund.

 I would be running around this idyllic little chalet and Grandpa would bring me my favourite foods, florentines and white nectarines. It didn’t occur to me that he was a celebrity in any way

However, the stage work that is currently Nadya’s focus is her own. The Passenger is her first full-length play. It is directed by RSC veteran Tim Supple and stars Jewish actor Robert Neumark Jones as Otto.

The possibility of a stage version of the novel first emerged when a friend of Nadya’s recommended Boschwitz’s book to her.

Like many who read it after it was republished in English in 2018, Nadya found the book to be a deeply unsettling story of an assimilated German Jew attempting to avoid arrest by taking trains as the Nazi net tightened.

“It was originally called The Man Who Took Trains, because Boschwitz liked the idea of writing a thriller. It’s an incredibly filmic story to put on stage and also a bit of a puzzle as it is set [largely] in [moving] train carriages in a static space,” says Nadya. In her research she “geeked out” on other works about how Jews were dispossessed of their civilised lives in Nazi Germany such as Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns.

Boschwitz’s own personal experience was no less disturbing. He wrote the book quickly at the age of 23 following Kristallnacht. His own flight from the Nazis had brought him to Britain where he was interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man. The government then shipped him and other refugees to a camp in Australia where in 1942 he was finally classified as a “friendly alien”, only to be killed along with hundreds of others on his way back to Britain when a German torpedo sunk his ship. He was 27.

Kelly Price and Robert Neumark Jones Photo: Steve GregsonSteve Gregson

Nadya has her own unsettling experience to relate about the book. She first read it in her husband’s country Austria when they were staying in his mother’s alpine village. “I was in this small mountain a ski resort. It was lockdown and I was in the house on my own when I got a call from my sister-in-law to say the police were going to door to door to check that everyone who was in the village had registered with them.” Nadya hadn’t registered and her sister-in-law had rung to tell her not to open the door.

“It was a simple thing but I suddenly became petrified. Should I open the door? If I didn’t, would it look suspicious?”

Though intense, her fear was nothing that a bottle of wine and a diazepam brought over by her mother-in-law couldn’t sort out. But Nadya was very much aware that her response had not been that of “your average Austrian person” and that she “had completely lost it”.

It was as if the survival instincts of her Jewish paternal genes had kicked in. (Her mother is Brigid Gabriel, daughter of the 19th Baron Sempill.) That and an awareness that she was in a place with a particular history when it came to how it treated it Jews

“Borschwitz’s book is set a few months after the Anschluss. When that happened Austrians were making Jews clean the streets with toothbrushes. They did it with great alacrity. They did it before Kristallnacht.”

In addition, the village in which Nadya read the book had its own history of antisemitism. The ski resort that put the village and indeed the region on the map was founded by a Jew who despite having converted to Christianity was, Nadya says, sent to a concentration camp. Mauthausen she thinks.

Robert Neumark Jones (left) and Ben Fox Photo: Steve GregsonSteve Gregson

It was deemed insufficient punishment for being Jewish, however. His Aryan, Christian wife was isolated by her neighbours.

“Everyone knew everyone. Then one winter, she was unable to leave the house because she had hurt her ankle. She needed help to be fed but nobody did and she starved.” This in a small village of some 2,000 people but which back then had an even smaller population.

All this – reading Boschwitz’s book, the place where she first read it and adapting the work for the stage – has made Nadya all too aware of how she might have fared in the circumstances in which her protagonist Otto finds himself.

“My mother isn’t Jewish, but I was brought up by my father from the age of 12 and everything about him absolutely is. He always reminded us of what life would been like under the Nazis. ‘Well, you would have been gassed,’ he said.

My mother isn’t Jewish, but I was brought up by my father from the age of 12 and everything about him absolutely is. He always reminded us of what life would been like under the Nazis

“And when I came to Austria I realised how uncomfortable people still are with the word Jew. They ask, ‘Are you….Jewish?’ I had just never been asked that question, apart from friends who wondered if I was going to have a bat mitzvah.

“So, yes, the book has made me think of what it would have been like [living under the Nazis] and what it would have meant for me. But also what it would have meant for my children.”

Her youngest might just be the latest Menuhin to take up music.

“I’ve forced him to play. No I haven’t,” she corrects herself.

“He loves it and it is lovely to have live music in the house. Because that has what has been important for the family. It continues.”

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The Passenger is at The Finborough Theatre until March 15

www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk