Like many old works, this play has a fresh resonance nearly 25 years after it first appeared. In this case it is the plight of refugees. Just before World War II Jewish children were evacuated from Nazi Germany and sent, without their parents, to England. This sort of forced removal now is happening all over the world.
The play explores, through the experience of a young girl, Eva, what it means to be sent away alone to a strange country. Looming over her is a storybook figure, the Rat Catcher, a dark version of the Pied Piper, someone who steals children.
Diane Samuels’s script focuses on the interactions and conflicts between Eva and her mother in Hamburg, when she was young; between her and her foster mother in England; and then moves forward to the present (1993) when Eva has grown up (and become frightfully English as a way of coping) and has her own daughter, Faith. The historical context of such Jewish refugees is well known, and clear here, but it becomes more a family drama.
Many child refugees now are not welcomed nearly so warmly and do have not enough support to have the problems this drama explores. Without the context of the contemporary world, the resonances in this production are fainter than they might be.
Read the full review by John McCallum at The Australian (subscription only).