Revival of inspiring tale fails to deliver

KINDERTRANSPORT, Opera House, Manchester (to Saturday)

This revival tour started last year to mark the 75th anniversary of the transport of 10,000 Jewish children from Germany to England as war came ever more obviously near.

But while the Kindertransport was a praiseworthy act of bureaucratic selflessness on the part of the British authorities, and a collective act of inspiring bravery by the children who left their families behind, this revival displays remarkably little of either trait.

Diane Samuels’ drama, written in the Nineties, uses the story of one little girl, Eva (last night Alicia Ambrose-Bayly), who goes from a nice life in Hamburg to boarding with Lil Miller (Maggie Steed) in Manchester, as the springboard for a complicated family drama.

The play tells Eva’s story and hers alone among the 10,000, and an offbeat one it is too — one that I suspect hardly represents the situation of most of the refugees.

This is given a parallel with the modern-day grand daughter of Lil (Faith, played by Rosie Holden), who is keen to find out more about her otherwise cloudy family history.

What it quickly comes down to is that Lil’s neurotic, obsessive, slightly paranoid daughter Evelyn (Janet Dibley) is in fact Eva, grown up and still here, naturalised and passport-equipped by means we aren’t entirely sure were legal.

While this is an interesting premise, Samuels drives a train through it by putting the three women at loggerheads with each other, turning the revelations of familial connection from sentimental and honest discovery to unnaturally strident and more than a little hysterical — particularly from Faith, who goes from fascination and curiosity about her mother’s history to angry disturbance in the space of a few lines of dialogue.

Samuels drips information about Eva and her family life in Hamburg into the mix from time to time, and ends as the now teenage girl realises her own mother (Emma Deegan), who has survived the war and lives in New York, holds fewer ties for her than Lil — which given Eva’s girlish quest to be reunited with her parents, is another plot resolution that seems a little hollow.