4.5 STARS, September 16-23. A heart-wrenching piece of theatre that deftly explores the traumatic trans-generational repercussions of escape from the Holocaust with the unstoppable force of a run away locomotive, says Richard Nye
”It’s no good burying stuff, love. You have to get rid.”
So says Lil to her foster daughter, Evelyn, in Diane Samuels’s classic modern play, Kindertransport. Evelyn, in her 50s when the play is set, was once Eva, part of the 10,000-strong host of Jewish children who arrived in Britain from Central Europe on the eve of World War II, fleeing the anticipated horrors to come. But when her own grown-up daughter discovers Evelyn’s original identity, Evelyn and Lil are forced to trawl through the documents of a faded, forsaken past, forcing repressed memories from their refuge in the crevasses of Evelyn’s mind.
It’s almost a quarter of a century now since Kindertransport first steamed onto the stage. But this week, in the dependable hands of the Richmond Shakespeare Society, it heaves back into heart-wrenching view, a seamless mix of tenderness, trauma and trains. Gondwana Pintsch is captivating as young Eva in the memory scenes, evolving from the naïve eight-year-old refugee who expects everyone in England to own a dog into a teenager of apparent self-possession, meeting again the mother whom the newsreels had consumed, even if the death camps had not. Lily Tomlinson is suitably, consistently, shriekingly annoying as Evelyn’s daughter, Faith (22 going on 16), while the older women are emotionally incisive as the three corners of a triangle fashioned by chance from history’s indifferent churn.
But is Lil right? Must the shocks and wounds of the past, like the documents that evoke them, eventually be brought into the light? Or are they better left lying, like the sleeping dogs of England that inhabited young Eva’s imagination? This is the question at the moral heart of Kindertransport. Evelyn has for years skipped lightly over the bones of her lost inheritance, delighting in her naturalised, baptised English life. But questions of identity never quite go away. Below the surface are the resentments and confusions of a fractured soul, brought to the boil by her daughter’s discovery, just as when her mother had emerged from the ashes of Europe, an improbable phantom, almost 35 years before.
As the drama in this excellent production peaked, Evelyn voicing her distress at first losing, then meeting again her mother, a line from somewhere else crept up on me. Drawn from a different well, it seemed nonetheless to blend with Evelyn’s tears, transcending context, and followed me home from the theatre. It was a line from Vanessa Bell in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf, reacting to the manuscript of Virginia’s novel, To the Lighthouse. In the character of Mrs Ramsay, Virginia had portrayed their long-departed mother so vividly as to leave Vanessa emotionally shattered.
“It is almost painful,” she wrote, “to have her so raised from the dead.” Evelyn – or is it Eva? – would have known exactly what she meant.
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