Theatre - Kindertransport

Nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War approximately 10,000 Jewish children were transported from their homes in Nazi Germany and taken to foster homes in the UK. This mass rescue mission came in response to rising levels of Jewish persecution. It was known as the Kindertransport. Diane Samuel’s award-winning play takes the experiences of a young girl involved in the Kindertransport, Eva, and sets it alongside the story of her older self. Now a mother, her memories resurface as daughter Faith is packing up to leave home for university. The acclaimed theatre company Shared Experience is reviving the play fifteen years after it was written, ‘at a time when mass migration and refugees are constantly in the headlines’. In a recent radio interview writer Samuels described the experience of returning to the play after so many years. “It’s perfect timing”, she said, “My older son has just left home for university…so I’m dealing with the same feelings of separation and ending.”
In the same interview she discussed the responsibility of representing such recent history to audiences who could remember it first hand. She remembered one episode in detail. “A woman stood up at a post-show discussion and said she was very upset by the ending when Eva meets her mother again and rejects her, saying that I had got it completely wrong. But then before I had to say anything, another person stood up and said she had behaved exactly like Eva. For her it was completely right”. ER