GORE BAY—Island fans of live theatre were presented with one of the most challenging productions the Gore Bay Theatre Company has ever attempted and the verdict was upstanding, as in ovation.
Armed with the combined talents of a veteran cadre of thespians, co-directors Walter Maskel and Andrea Emmerton have crafted the company’s latest QUONTA (the Northern Ontario theatre competition) entry ‘Kindertransport’ into 70-minutes of breathtaking drama.
The story itself follows the tale of one of the thousands of children who were whisked out of Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust that sought to wipe the Jewish peoples from the face of the earth and resettled with families in England, but the historical context provides the canvas on which an exploration of mother/daughter relationships plays out.
This dramatic production provided plenty of opportunity for the actors to showcase their talents and experience, and providing a special challenge for the young lead, Kayla Greenman who not only had to master a German accent, but also the delivery of lines in Deutsch and a German accented English, before transitioning into the Queen’s English perfect pitch of the Anglophilic Evelyn.
Ms. Greenman not only rose to the challenge presented by the diction dictates of the play, but delivered a standout performance in her transition from Ava, the frightened 10-year-old child boarding the train out of Hamburg for the first time without her parents, travelling to a strange new land and the bosom of an unknown English foster home, through Ava as the anxious young woman trying to rescue her parents from the thrall of a Germany gripped in the depravity of Nazi ideology, to the transition into the pseudo-self-assured Evelyn, a 17-year-old woman who turns her back on her family, religion, culture and nationality to embrace that of her adopted England.
The work of dialect coach Ingrid Belenson shines through with every spoken line in this production.
Veteran actress Shannon McMullan plays a concurrent role with Ms. Greenman as the middle-aged Evelyn, turning in one of the most invocative performances of her Gore Bay stage career. Ms. McMullan’s tremendous vault of stage experience no doubt played a major role in enabling her to paint a sympathetic portrait of someone who has cast aside everything of her former life so completely. If not for an all-but-forgotten box of letters and official documents hidden in the family attic to be stumbled upon by her daughter Lil, played with convincing teenaged angst by Lori Evans, that past might have remained hidden and lost forever.
Another familiar face on the Gore Bay stage, Tara Bernatchez, plays the role of Ava’s mother Helga, channeling both the agonies of a doting mother who must send her daughter off to the arms of strangers in a foreign land and that of a mother rejected by a daughter for whom she has survived the hells of Auschwitz to reclaim.
Although it might seem that Kyleen Robertson, who plays the adoptive English mother Faith, is spared complexity by being able to maintain the same accent throughout the production, her role saw her bounced back and forth through time, place and dramatic pace as she fills the role of mother, then grandmother, as the play unfolds. Non-linear in sequence, Ms. Robertson’s role literally transforms as she walks through the decades from one side of the stage to the other—covering decades in less than a dozen steps. “It all flows smoothly,” she confides following the Saturday night performance.
Finally, there is the exceptional Jack Clark. While Mr. Clark is possibly the least experienced of the actors in ‘Kindertransport,’ he took on a wide variety of roles, sweeping seamlessly from the malevolent ‘Ratcatcher’ of a dark children’s fairytale, the grasping evil of a Nazi train guard, the thoughtless cheer of an English postman and the indifferent racism of an English train conductor.
The production values were also solid in this production, with a simple stage design that served equally stellar duty whether as an attic, a train station, train car and living room. When the stage dressing only complements, not distracts, from the action under the lights, stage manager Bill Viertelhausen and his assistant Kathy Maskel can stand proudly behind the scenes. The costumes of Suzanne Stoner evoked their differing epochs smoothly and the sound, technically by Vincente Belenson and written and performed by Jean Lavalle (pre-show and show) and Vern Dorge (Eva/Evalyn’s theme), was tone perfect to the point.
