HOLOCAUST Memorial Day is on 27th January, so there could hardly be a more appropriate time to stage Diane Samuels’ powerful play Kindertransport, which opens the 2025 season at Yeovil’s Swan Theatre and runs to Saturday 25th January.
This is a play which does not pull its punches. It is hard, at times feels bitter and almost brutal. It asks harsh questions, not only about the legacy of the Holocaust and the continuing and shocking level of anti-semitism (not just in the Middle East but in this country and around the world), but also the nature of love and trust between a mother and daughter, the “rights” of children to know about their families and the need for traumatised and damaged people to find a way to live their lives without endlessly revisiting the past.
The playwright is brave in offering no easy answers.
As well as being a harrowing study of separation and a quest for identity, the play will evoke very different reactions in individual audience members. We may – depending on our age, relationship with (adult) children or political world view – bring our own experience and prejudices to our reactions to the drama.
We may identify with one or other of the three protagonists. We may – must – sympathise with Evelyn, who came to England in 1939 as Eva, a nine year old Jewish child on the Kindertransport scheme, found a home with a kindly Manchester woman, Lil Miller, and who has become both English and Christian. She has shut her past away in packing cases in the attic.
We surely sympathise with Lil (Jo Simpson, utterly convincing as an ordinary woman who did an extraordinary thing that changed her life for ever), watching the agony of her adopted daughter as her grand-daughter, Faith, opens the packing cases – a clear metaphor for Evelyn’s past – and tries to prise those memories out of her fiercely private mother.
How you feel about Faith (a bravely uncompromising performance from Georgia Holder) is much more complicated and it is hugely to Samuels’ credit that she doesn’t ask us to like her, just to recognise her deep need to know who she really is and where she comes from. She won’t … perhaps can’t … understand that her mother doesn’t want to discover long-lost relatives, reconnect with the religion of her distant childhood or even talk about her memories of that childhood.
Director Mark Payne and his strong cast, led by Sarah Ambrose as Evelyn, have brought this fierce, important play vividly to life. There is an unsparing honesty in the portrayal of Eva/Evelyn’s journey, from the agony of the nine year old child (Grace Butcher) parting from her loving mother in Hamburg to the equally painful but harsher meeting after the war, when Auschwitz survivor Helga (Alison Maynard Griffin) cannot comprehend the emotional and physical changes which her teenage daughter has had to make – to survive in her new life.
The idea of discovering who you are, rather than “who you think you are”, is now a commonplace of television reality shows and has been democratised through the work of Ancestry.com and its DNA service. Sometimes what you find may shatter your idea of your family history and sometimes it reveals exciting truths and answers long-unanswered questions. What Faith discovers in that Manchester attic untethers her from her known world – but it pitches her mother back into the past she has tried to block out.
You leave the theatre profoundly moved, perhaps disturbed, but grateful for an insight into the limitless instincts that human beings have to survive and to make sense of their lives.
FC