Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and touring 2007

The End of Everything Ever.

IT COULD so easily have gone wrong. Any theatre company doing a show about Kindertransport, the mass escape by Jewish children from Nazi Europe, risks hitting a false note. Too solemn and the show is mawkish. Too light and it trivialises a terrible tragedy. Aiming the performance at young teenagers makes the balance more delicate still.

So it’s a considerable credit to the multinational NIE company that ‘The End of Everything Ever’ is at once a spirited piece of theatre and a forceful testament to the lives wrecked by the evil Nazi machine.

On one hand, it is a bright and lively ensemble piece of theatre, rich in quirky character detail and bubbling with live music. On the other, it creates a flavour of wartime Europe, a portrait of Jewish family life, an impression of the hardships of a girl’s trek to Britain and, in the final moments, a heart-breaking account of the human cost of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies.

Drawing on the accounts of the 10,000 children who fled Eastern Europe in the months between Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the outbreak of war, the play tells the story of a Jewish girl living in Berlin at a time of escalating violence.

She’s old enough to know something is going on, but too young to appreciate the implications. Her games of hide and seek with her family blur with the genuine terror of hiding from the brown shirts. She’s baffled when her friendly approach to a former teacher and casual condemnation of Adolf Hitler is met with a look of absolute terror.

All this is achieved with theatrical economy using a wardrobe that doubles as elevator and train compartment as the story demands. The bare-bones set places all focus on the actors who step in and out of character in a way that is both playful and serious.

Endearing themselves to the audience, they tell the story with wit and fluidity, as liable to pick up a guitar or squeezebox as they are to slip into character as an officious ticket inspector, a scatty English gent or the doddering soldiers of the Home Guard.

Their inventiveness and imagination prevents the story ever becoming solemn, while the taste of true-life detail keeps us on track for the devastating finale in which the girl, fast-forwarding to 1951, discovers the grim fate of her family. Presented by the Bank of Scotland Children’s International Theatre Festival, it is free from all classroom worthiness and comes highly recommended whatever your age.

(The End of Everything Ever is at the Garrison Theatre, Lerwick, Shetland, on 29 May)

© Mark Fisher, 2007