KINDERTRANSPORT

This play written by Diane Samuels was first performed on stage in 1993. Her aim was 'to probe the inner life where memory is shaped by trauma, history meets story, in order to gain psychological and emotional insight into how a damaged psyche can survive, possibly recover, and whether there might ever be an opportunity to thrive.'
     She tells the story of a child who is sent to Britain for safe keeping by her Jewish parents the year before the second world war started, and before the start of mass genocide. Over 10,000 children were transported abroad. Many never saw their parents again.
     In Samuel's play the child, Eva, adapts to her new family who embrace her. With no news from her parents for years they assume they have been killed, and Eva settles into life in Manchester. She has nightmares about the Rat catcher, a children's story about the Pied Piper of Hamlin, abducting children.
       Eight years later, Efa's mother turns up having survived the holocaust. But Efa doesn't want to go with her to start a new life in the States. The mother leaves devastated. This for me was the most moving part of the play. Imagine the dilemma of sending your child away in the belief that they will be safe. The child feels punished for being sent away. She would have preferred to have died in a concentration camp than be wrenched from her parents.  In dreams, she sees the Rat catcher in her mother's eyes. Her mother longs to be reunited with her daughter but time and circumstances have changed the daughter's attachment. Her British adoptive mother is now the primary attachment figure.
     Against this story is the story of  Efa's current relationship with her own daughter who is on the verge of leaving home, and their attachment and loss issues, so much influenced by Efa's traumatic childhood.
      The play is very good but this production is disappointing. It feels very clunky, and that may be due to the direction. The set also doesn't really do the play justice. There's lots of scope for a more inventive and atmospheric set, lighting and sound. Perhaps this is why it played to a half empty auditorium at the New Theatre in Cardiff.
It's currently on tour throughout Britain until March 2014.