REVIEW: Kindertransport (Theatre Royal, Brighton, until Saturday, November 23)

Lt-Rt: Paula Wilcox (Lil), Gabrielle Dempsey (Eva) Kindertransport by Diane Samuels, directed by Andrew Hall. Photo: Andrew Hall.

Seventy five years on from the first evacuation of Jewish children to Britain from Nazi Europe, a touring production is dramatically telling the story in a way that is both deeply harrowing and gloriously uplifting.

The 1993 play Kindertransport by Diane Samuels isn’t so much about the horrors of the Holocaust but more the impact on the rescued children who were separated from their parents and taken to a different culture where they faced kindness, indifference, occasional exploitation, and the selflessness of ordinary people.

It’s also very much a play about the relationship between mothers and daughters: the play looks at the parallel lives of German mother Helga who is preparing her precocious daughter Eva to be transported from Hamburg to England on the eve of World War Two, and the lives of English mother and daughter Evelyn and Faith in the present day – a time difference gradually explained powerfully.