New Adaptation of THE PASSENGER Comes to the Finborough Theatre Next Month

The world premiere of a new adaptation of The Passenger by Nadya Menuhin, based on the critically acclaimed novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, and directed by the multi-award-winning former Artistic Director of the Young Vic, Tim Supple, will open at the Finborough Theatre for a five-week limited season on Monday, 10 February 2025.

The Passenger stars Ben Fox (Mother Courage (Southwark Playhouse), Troilus and Cressida and Bedroom Farce (Theatr Cymru), Blitz (Steve McQueen, Apple TV+); Eric MacLennan (Summer and Smoke (Duke of York’s Theatre and Almeida Theatre), Three Sisters (Almeida Theatre), Brave New World and 1984 (Creation Theatre Company)); Dan Milne (More Grimm Tales, The Jungle Book, As I Lay Dying and Twelfth Night (The Young Vic), Grimm Tales (The Young Vic and International Tour), The Comedy of Errors (Royal Shakespeare Company)); Robert Neumark Jones (One Jewish Boy (Old Red Lion Theatre and Trafalgar Studios), The Mikvah Project (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond), A Very Royal Scandal (Amazon MGM Studios)); Kelly Price (Grantchester, Endeavour (ITV), Flowers for Mrs Harris (Riverside Studios), The Sex Party and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (Menier Chocolate Factory)). 

Shot through with Hitchcockian tension, The Passenger is the terrifyingly absurd story of Otto Silbermann, a criminal on the run who hasn’t committed a crime.

Kristallnacht, Berlin, November 1938. The streets of Germany are an orgy of state-sanctioned violence.

As Nazi storm troopers batter down his door, respected businessman Otto flees his home and finds himself plunged into a new world order, his life dissolved overnight. 

Betrayed by family, friends and colleagues, and desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape his homeland that is no longer home... 

23 year old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938 in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht. Rediscovered 70 years later, The Passenger became an international hit, was translated into over twenty languages and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller more than 80 years after it was originally published. 

Playwright Nadya Menuhin makes her full-length debut at the Finborough Theatre. She studied languages at University College London, and currently works as a literary agent. She was part of The Royal Court Theatre Writers’ Group, mentored by Stef Smith, and BBC Writersroom London Voices cohort. Her previous plays include I, Mother (Fuel Residency at Druid Theatre, Galway), The Second Rule (Mercury Theatre, Colchester) and Tremors, starring Tamsin Greig (Online for Bitter Pill Theatre).

Novelist Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915-1942) was born in Berlin. In 1935, Boschwitz’s uncle, the lawyer Alexander Wolgast, was murdered in the street after criticizing the Nazi’s anti-semitic Nuremberg Laws. Shortly thereafter, Boschwitz and his mother fled Germany for Norway; his sister, Clarissa, had already left Germany for Palestine when the Nazis came to power. In Norway, Boschwitz wrote his first novel Menschen neben dem Leben (People Alongside Life), which was first published in Swedish, under the pseudonym John Grane, in 1937. From Sweden, he and his mother moved to Luxembourg, France, and Belgium, before fleeing to Britain in 1939. Boschwitz wrote The Passenger (Der Reisende) in 1938, and it was published in French, Swedish and English. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Boschwitz and his mother were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ on the Isle of Man. In July 1940, Ulrich was deported to Australia, where he was interned at a camp in New South Wales. On the voyage there, a crew member threw the only draft of his latest work, Das Grosse Fressen (The Big Feast), into the ocean. In Australia, Boschwitz worked on revising a second edition of The Passenger and began a new novel, Traumtage (Dream Days). In 1942, he was freed and allowed to return to Britain. On 29 October 1942, the vessel he was on, MV Abosso, was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz, aged 27, was one of the 362 people onboard who died. His last works died with him.

Director Tim Supple’s awards and nominations include Olivier, BAFTA, Evening Standard, Time Out, TMA, Herald Angel, Dora Mavor Moore Award in Toronto, and Yapi Krede Afifi in Istanbul. He was the former Artistic Director of The Young Vic where he directed A Servant to Two Masters (also West End, National and International Tours), As I Lay Dying, Twelfth Night, Blood Wedding, The Jungle Book, Grimm Tales (also International Tour), More Grimm Tales (also Broadway), The Slab Boys Trilogy and Oedipus. For the Royal Shakespeare Company, he directed Midnight’s Children (Barbican, National Tour and Apollo Theatre, New York), Love in a Wood, Tales from Ovid (The Young Vic), The Comedy of Errors (The Young Vic, National and International Tours) and Spring Awakening (Barbican Theatre). For the National Theatre, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Billy Liar (also National Tour), Accidental Death of an Anarchist (also National Tour), Whale, Romeo and Juliet, and The Villains Opera. For The Donmar Warehouse, The Cosmonauts Last Message… For Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, Coriolanus and John Sessions’ Traveling Tales. Other theatre includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream and One Thousand and One Nights (Dash Arts and Edinburgh Festival), Freedom on the Tyne (Tyne Bridge), The Tempest (National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing), Dmitry (Marylebone Theatre), What We Did To Weinstein (Dash Arts and Menier Chocolate Factory), As You Like It (Dash Arts and Curve Leicester), Beasts and Beauties, Too Clever By Half (Norwegian National Theatre, Bergen), Much Ado About Nothing (Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin), The Comedy of Errors (BBT, Istanbul), Oh What a Lovely War, Guys and Dolls (Haymarket Theatre, Leicester) and Billy Budd (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield). He has directed, adapted, researched and taught theatre across the world in a wide range of languages – including in Europe, India, North Africa and the near East, Iran, Turkey, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia and the post-Soviet States, and North and South America. Tim is the recipient of a NESTA Invention and Innovation Award for experiments in film.

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