Prying open the lid on horrors of Kindertransport
GERMAN-JEWISH CHILDREN SHIPPED TO U.K.
Persephone Productions dramatizes an essential story no one else was rushing to tell
by MATT RADZ
When Faith, the inquisitive-daughter character in the play Kindertransport, dusts off a box in the attic where wartime secrets are hidden, her grandma Lil tells her to put the lid right back on it.
"A million things happened during the war," the older woman shrugs, a if the silence was a lie necessary to deal with too many tales of horror.
It's one of the most revealing scenes in the Persephone Productions' staging of the Holocaust memory-play by Diane Samuels, a 42-year-old playwright from Liverpool.
"Kindertransport" saw thousands of German-Jewish children shipped off to Britain by their parents, ahead of the Hitler deluge. Lacking the massive Spielbergian drama of the Nazi death camps, or even the slightest dimension of military heroism, their exile remains one of those unknown World War II tales just now emerging into the light of public remembrance.
Some of the "kinder" were well treated, a few were abused by their Brit hosts, most of them never saw their parents again. Each child was personally traumatized by so wrenching an experience.
Samuels's play, first staged in London in 1993, dramatizes the story of 9-year-old Eva who is taken in by Lil. After the war, Eva stays in England and passes as Lil's English daughter Evelyn.
Kindertransport opens as Evelyn's curious daughter, Faith, is about to quit the family nest to live on her own. She discovers the secret of little Eva, forcing Lil and Evelyn to confront the emotional truth of their conspiracy to distort family history.
If this sounds frothily melodramatic, it is, but the effort, as a whole, is worthwhile, if not entirely compelling. Director Gabrielle Soskin controls the damage caused by an important but mediocre text and the limitations of her young theatre company.
Score Persephone's Kindertransport as a fine example of the emerging form chez nous - post-graduate student theatre.
Director Soskin is a member of the theatre faculty at John Abbott and most of her actors and crew are recent students of the West Island college. Theirs is the sort of smart theatre that always looks as if its reach is about to catch up to its ambitions.
Samuels is a writer of children's plays and Kindertransport sounds both overcontrived and a little simplistic. A bedtime tale of history writ large, with scary Ratcatcher/abyss symbolism.
The language is not memorable, though the directness of Samuels's style is well suited in dramatizing an essential story no one else was rushing to break.
In the cast, only Nicole Shery as Eva and Lael Stellick in a variety of stock characters (Immigration Officer, Ratcatcher) create anything like interpretative excitement. Andrée McNamara Tait's Evelyn rates a mention - at lest her accent serves a dramatic purpose.
Not so when Eva talks to her "mutti" in the flashbacks that are the play's narrative backbone. They converse with a Hogan's Heroes German accent. If Eva and her mutti are in Deutschland, speaking the language of the fatherland to each other, vhy der shtupid agzcents?
Reprinted from The Montreal Gazette October 15, 2002
When Faith, the inquisitive-daughter character in the play Kindertransport, dusts off a box in the attic where wartime secrets are hidden, her grandma Lil tells her to put the lid right back on it.
"A million things happened during the war," the older woman shrugs, a if the silence was a lie necessary to deal with too many tales of horror.
It's one of the most revealing scenes in the Persephone Productions' staging of the Holocaust memory-play by Diane Samuels, a 42-year-old playwright from Liverpool.
"Kindertransport" saw thousands of German-Jewish children shipped off to Britain by their parents, ahead of the Hitler deluge. Lacking the massive Spielbergian drama of the Nazi death camps, or even the slightest dimension of military heroism, their exile remains one of those unknown World War II tales just now emerging into the light of public remembrance.
Some of the "kinder" were well treated, a few were abused by their Brit hosts, most of them never saw their parents again. Each child was personally traumatized by so wrenching an experience.
Samuels's play, first staged in London in 1993, dramatizes the story of 9-year-old Eva who is taken in by Lil. After the war, Eva stays in England and passes as Lil's English daughter Evelyn.
Kindertransport opens as Evelyn's curious daughter, Faith, is about to quit the family nest to live on her own. She discovers the secret of little Eva, forcing Lil and Evelyn to confront the emotional truth of their conspiracy to distort family history.
If this sounds frothily melodramatic, it is, but the effort, as a whole, is worthwhile, if not entirely compelling. Director Gabrielle Soskin controls the damage caused by an important but mediocre text and the limitations of her young theatre company.
Score Persephone's Kindertransport as a fine example of the emerging form chez nous - post-graduate student theatre.
Director Soskin is a member of the theatre faculty at John Abbott and most of her actors and crew are recent students of the West Island college. Theirs is the sort of smart theatre that always looks as if its reach is about to catch up to its ambitions.
Samuels is a writer of children's plays and Kindertransport sounds both overcontrived and a little simplistic. A bedtime tale of history writ large, with scary Ratcatcher/abyss symbolism.
The language is not memorable, though the directness of Samuels's style is well suited in dramatizing an essential story no one else was rushing to break.
In the cast, only Nicole Shery as Eva and Lael Stellick in a variety of stock characters (Immigration Officer, Ratcatcher) create anything like interpretative excitement. Andrée McNamara Tait's Evelyn rates a mention - at lest her accent serves a dramatic purpose.
Not so when Eva talks to her "mutti" in the flashbacks that are the play's narrative backbone. They converse with a Hogan's Heroes German accent. If Eva and her mutti are in Deutschland, speaking the language of the fatherland to each other, vhy der shtupid agzcents?
Reprinted from The Montreal Gazette October 15, 2002