Edwards Theatre Company
Kindertransport
Founded in 1998, Edward's has gained a reputation for imaginative and thought provoking productions at the Fringe. The Company aims to produce a wide variety of work for as broad an audience as possible and returns to the Fringe after last year's acclaimed production of A Servant of Two Masters.
1938. Nine year old Eva arrives in Manchester, alone - one of the 10,000 children sent from Germany on the Kindertransport. Eva's story is one of survival and love - but at what cost? One that echoes down the generations.
"through our children we live. - that's how we cheat death."
Performances:
10th - 15th August
Price:
£7.00 (£5.00) »
Worth seeing more than once.
Mournful Klezmer music plays, then a lively thirties dance band tune. The lights come up on Diane Samuels' Kindertransport, a play about the evacuation of Jewish children from Nazi territory on the eve of the Second World War.
Thousands of children were sent to Britain and other countries. Quaker volunteers went to German railway stations and saw them on their way, or helped them join their foster families in Britain. The children were saved from the Holocaust - but most never saw their birth families again. They were cut off from everything they had known and forced to live entirely new lives.
As the play begins, on one side of the stage, we're in 1939. Eva Schlesinger is leaving Hamburg for her new home in Manchester. Her mother, Helga, reassures her that they'll soon be together again. Eva puts on a brave face, but underneath, she is frightened and angry. She senses everything is about to change.
The lights come up on the other side of the stage - and we're in the 1980s, in an attic in London. Faith, a student, finds 40 year old papers belonging to a girl called Eva Schlesinger. Who was Eva? What happened to her? And what are her papers doing in Faith's mother's attic? When Faith's mother Evelyn refuses to answer her questions, Faith is frightened and angry. She senses something important is being hidden from her. Once she knows what it is, her entire view of her family may change.
Then Faith's grandmother, Lil, begins to tell her the story of Eva's time in Manchester, her struggles to cope with a new country, and her desperate search for her original family. The revelations keep coming. As in a good mystery story, the most telling emerges at the very end.
The young cast cope marvellously with a complex storyline and many-sided characters. Evocative staging and direction bring us very close to a many-sided play. It is a mystery story about two women searching in different ways for their families, a story of a foster mother's love for her daughter - and a story of the anger, despair and undoing which Samuels describes as 'the cost of survival'. This is a play worth seeing more than once - not only a story of the Holocaust, but a story of mothers and daughters struggling to overcome obstacles they never chose.
Sigrid Nielsen