I am going to discuss is 'Kindertransport' and my own piece 'The adoption'

I am going to discuss is 'Kindertransport' and my own piece 'The adoption'

Danielle Grennan May2003 Performance Evaluation

===============================================

The work I am going to discuss is 'Kindertransport' and my own piece

'The adoption'. I saw 'Kindertransport' in October 2002 at the

Redbridge Drama Centre; my own piece was devised and performed in May

2003 also at the Redbridge Drama Centre. Both pieces have very similar

themes about mother and daughter relationships and the difficulty of

giving children away. Although both pieces are set in different

periods of time. The theme of mother and daughter relationship is not

very comprehensible so it is quite hard to act.

My contribution to 'The adoption' was the part of the daughter, Clare

Andrews, I had to be very aware of what a child of 11 would of felt

like finding out she was adopted and had been lied to by the main

person in her life. It was quite a difficult part to play and I

personally feel I did not do it justice partly because of the time we

had to prepare the piece and I did not learn the part as much as I

would of liked to.

I looked for articles on the Internet about mothers who have lost

their daughters as part of my presentation. I also played a clip from

'Buffy the vampire slayer' showing this issue. I found many articles

about this subject and they helped me to understand the emotions and

anxieties of mothers who have lost their daughters. I think it did

support our piece because by giving it more realistic feelings and

emotions felt by mothers.

Our piece was set in the modern day and 'Kindertransport' was set in

the 1930s and modern day. Both pieces were about having to give your

daughters away for various reasons.

In 'Kindertransport', due to the historical background, the mother had

to give her child away for its own safety because it was the time of

the Holocaust. In our piece the mother had to give her daughter away

because of her age and her parents. But in both pieces both mothers

come back for their daughters and they chose to stay with their

adoptive mothers.

The characters in our piece were just general middle class people in

modern times dealing with this hard but common issue. The characters

in 'Kindertansport' were very different, the real mother and daughter

are Jewish German citizens trying to escape the Jewish persecutions

and the adoptive mother and the daughter's daughter are just modern

day middle class people similar to the characters in our piece. This

was shown by accents for the different nationalities.