Guest Blog: Author Jodi Picoult on Cancel Culture and the Power of Rhetoric in Adapting THE BOOK THIEF

Six years ago, when the American creative team of The Book Thief musical began adapting Markus Zusak’s beloved novel, we thought were presenting a slice of history.  The story follows an illiterate young girl in Nazi Germany, whose foster family hides a Jew in their basement. Through her experiences, she learns that words can harm, heal, and inspire change. My co-writers Timothy Allen McDonald, Kate Anderson, Elyssa Samsel, and I were drawn to a tale that explored how language contributed to the rise and fall of a fascist nation.

We didn’t realise quite how timely our journey would be.

The 2016 election changed our country. The populace grew more polarised. There was a rise in hate speech and antisemitism. Crimes against LGBTQ people soared. In the past two years alone, book banning has increased 1100%. Last year I was in the middle of a rehearsal for The Book Thief’s premiere, watching a prop book being burned, when I learned that one of my novels had been banned in a school district in Florida. 

Just months later, that same book has been banned in school districts in more than 25 states. In one Florida district, twenty of my novels were removed from the school library overnight at the request of a parent who admitted she had not read them. She claimed they have mature content – that’s code for sexually explicit - but many of them do not include a single kiss.  They do, however include topics like abortion rights, gun control, racism, and – like The Book Thief – the Holocaust: topics that make people think for themselves and question what they’ve been told. Which, of course, is what Nazis attempted to prevent during WWII.

Sometimes art imitates life… and it’s terrifying.

I am relatively new to writing librettos, but I’ve been writing novels about divisive topics for thirty years. What I love most about fiction is that it’s sneaky. Very few people will read the FBI report on school shooters, but they might pick up my novel Nineteen Minutes, about that very topic. They think they’re reading a make-believe tale… but when that last page is turned, they’re left thinking about the topic. Maybe, for the first time, they’ve heard the other side’s point-of-view. Maybe, for the first time, they question their own.  The best stories are two-fold: they whisk you into someone else’s life, but they also teach you something about your own. 

Theatre allows for the same subtle education, but in a shared space.  The learning doesn’t stop when the cast takes its bow – it continues in conversations inspired by the show that spill out on the street afterward, in every online post about a play that one cannot stop mulling over, in every musical earworm. Each time our creative team for The Book Thief revisits the script, we are gobsmacked by the reminder that this show about the power of rhetoric is not a snapshot of the past. It’s happening now. It’s happening again.

We hope that The Book Thief audiences will be chilled by the recreation of Nazi Germany in the theatre – but that they also recognise its growing echoes in the real world today.  Once again, humanity has found itself at a flash point where the course of the future will be determined by choices made in the present. Yet, as this story teaches us, even in the worst of times we have an infallible weapon: our voices, our thoughts, our words.

As our Narrator says in The Book Thief musical:  You have one life.  What are you going to do with it?

The Book Thief opens at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre from 11 - 16 September followed by Leicester’s Curve Theatre from 29 September - 14 October. 

Rehearsal Photos Credit: Steve Gregson