Kindertransport
From 12 May 2003
To 17 May 2003
by Diane Samuels
by arrangement with Nick Hern Books
Description
Kindertransport is the poignant story of nine-year-old Eva Schlesinger who, in 1938, was put aboard a train with other Jewish children and evacuated from Nazi Germany in a little-known rescue operation called the kindertransport. She is taken in and raised by an English woman. Torn between her German heritage and her desire to wipe the kindertransport experience from her memory, Eva tries to become "English" herself.
Based upon autobiographic accounts from kindertransport children, this play focuses on Eva at four points in her life. We are witness to the wealth of emotions encountered by Eva as she tries to deal with her families and herself while burdened by the painful past which was chosen for her.
This is a moving and thought-provoking play about mothers, daughters and the powerful need for reconciliation. It tells a story of survival which is captivating and ultimately uplifting.
Directors Notes
Writers looking for a break-through often need to find a new angle. There are lots of plays about relationships, love and marriage, family and other fundamentals of human life; however, it is the play with a new spin on these areas or which uses an unexplored aspect of history to come at such themes that often breaks through.
Such is the case with Diane Samuels’ Kindertransport, which on the surface is about the transportation of a Jewish German child Eva to England in the months before the outbreak of the Second World War. Eva is used as a type for other children who made the journey from their homeland to new families in England and thereby consciousness of a little dwellt upon aspect of Hitler’s anti-semitic policies is illuminated. However, boiling the play down to a specific social/historical incident does not do justice to the play’s layers of meaning and emotional depths. Kindertransport is also concerned with mothers and daughters, the primal nature of myth, guilt and denial, flying the nest, poor communication and manifestations of fear. It is these features that provide the play’s universality allowing it to speak to audiences whether they know much about the kindertransport or not; indeed the play drawn as docu-drama would, I am sure, be much less interesting and a “flatter” experience all round.
Indeed, one of the interesting aspects of Samuels’s text is that she informs the audience of details of the transportation in a natural way in the background of a scene or in the sub-text of a conversation, which makes the drama live in the moment rather than get subsumed under research. For instance, there is a scene in the second half where Eva is bundled out of a cinema auditorium by Lil; this in itself is dramatic as is the desire to shield a young girl from the horrors of war which is Lil’s motivation at this point; but what Samuels does not make a meal of is the fact that Jews had been outlawed from public places in Germany so the watching of news in an English cinema becomes a highly charged moment for Eva, quite apart from what is shown.
However, we also need to be alert to the possible poetic licence of Samuels’s story. Although the play’s characters are based on real life people, the Ratcatcher myth is clearly an imaginative overlay by the playwright – indeed, one used very flexibly and creatively alongside more factual research. Similarly, details in the play we may take at face value as things that lamentably did happen also need questioning: not every child travelling had to be labelled in a demeaning fashion; intrusive border officials were probably not commonplace; and often there would have been people who could understand German involved in receiving the kinder – that at least would be sensible. At such points in her script Diane Samuels can be forgiven for “cranking up” the drama rather than representing what happened with total veracity: if we want the facts about children being transported we can always read the history books; however, if we want an emotional journey then this is where theatre plays its part.
For it must be recognised that this is a vital and fascinating play, a deserved winner of the Verity Bargate award and a text to which groups with an interest in rich social history and strong relevant drama will continue to return. We have enjoyed working on it; and hope you will find tonight an engrossing experience.
The play takes place in an attic room in Evelyn’s house in an outer London suburb in the early eighties. However, it also dramatises events just before and after the Second World War. Diane Samuels has this to say on the matter: “Past and present are wound around each other throughout the play. They are not distinct but inextricably connected. The re-running of what happened many years ago is not there to explain how things are now, but is a part of the inner life of the present.”
A big thank you to Laurie Napier who endured the Kindertransport and then offered herself as our consultant on this production.