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The Book of Everything 2010 - Frenuyum - 12-05-2025
If it is appropriate to tell children these stories [Noah's Ark; The Plagues of Egypt —J], and I’m sure it is, we should encourage them to consider when and why they were written, to question how they relate to their own lives and to form their own opinions about their meaning.
Melbourne writer John Nieuwenhuizen’s excellent English translation of the novel The Book of Everything has been much acclaimed, but for this stage adaptation I worked from the Dutch original. I have tried to remain true to Kuijer’s powerful story and elegant language, but there will be differences between the play and the novel. I hope you will want to read both.
I am very grateful to Guus Kuijer for trusting me to do a faithful adaptation, to Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image and Company B Belvoir for commissioning the script and mounting the production, and to the cast and crew, both of this production and of a creative development workshop in 2008, who generously contributed their ideas to the final draft.
Quote:I can’t remember that God was ever a topic of conversation for us children. I mean in the street when there were no adults around. That is remarkable, when you consider that our lives were saturated with God … But in the street, that whole pious world disappeared over the horizon. We were cowboys and Indians, Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, cops and robbers, but never Jesus.
‘My father heartily looked forward to the second coming, and prayed regularly and fervently, “Come Lord Jesus, come soon!” And I remember that as a child I thought, “Yes, but not until after my birthday.”
‘I can’t remember any child who saw anything in the afterlife, because to look forward to that is to look down on the life that we have here on earth. Our prayer was always “Stay here you are Lord, and don’t move!” Children love life, you know, and so they should.’