Everything is Illuminated

Synopsis

Armed with only a fading yellow photograph, a young man arrives in the Ukraine to embark on an impossible journey ­ to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis over fifty years ago. Aided in his search by a translator with a unique grasp of English, a blind old man and a particularly amorous guide dog, Jonathan sets out on a quest that will turn all their lives upside down. Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measures, this is the first stage adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's award-winning novel.

Our Review:

20 September 2006

How do you write about the Holocaust? More precisely, how do you write about the Holocaust and still give your audience reason to laugh? And how do you adapt a multi-voice novel which includes myth, dips into different historical periods and veers between gut-wrenching tragedy and gut-aching comedy? Simon Block obviously doesn’t balk at a challenge. He has undertaken to turn Jonathan Safran Foer’s prizewinning tragi-comic novel into a play.

American writer Jonathan is visiting the Ukraine to search for Augustine, the woman he believes saved his grandfather’s life during the war. He is assisted by a translator whose family specialises in trips for American Jews seeking their pre-war roots and whose take on English owes more to studying a thesaurus and second-hand idioms than conversational practice. “I must eat a slice of humble pie” he says solemnly when things go wrong, money is “currency”, sight is not dimmed but “occluded by desire”.

Put simply, novels are long, play...

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