Full press reviews
****
Everything Theatre
Marianna Meloni
Dinah likes to describe herself as a ‘monster’ teenager. Abandoned at birth by her 15 year old mother, she goes from home to home until the day she is assigned to Lotte, an elderly and rather odd lady, who seems particularly keen on fostering her. Both women have wounds to heal and both find closure through experiencing their own pain from a different point of view. A series of flashbacks guides the audience through both women’s stories in this well-balanced and accomplished production.
The character of Lotte symbolises a whole generation of young migrants who were taken away from their families during the Second World War and sent to England to escape the Nazis. This is a difficult topic to confront and it would be easy to fall into meaningless rhetoric but Transports avoids this. Instead, we are presented with mere facts and with the hardship of two estranged women in need of a real family.
The set is minimal yet extremely functional; two sections of upstanding train track as a backdrop recall the implications of the title, while also serving as home furniture and a projection surface. Unfortunately it was not easy to see all these projections from my seat to the side, but this didn’t hugely affect my enjoyment of the piece. Every corner of the stage is in use and the two actresses move from one side to the other, smoothly facilitating scene changes.
The lighting, the music and the sound effects provide essential contributions to the performance. Never too loud and never inappropriate, they help to frame each sequence and mark the distinction between the two parallel lives well. Ambient noise is also used to set the background when there is a change of location. Despite the moving topic, writer and director Jon Welch doesn’t miss a chance to add a funny touch, which helps to hold back the tears on more than one occasion. The dialogue is beautifully polished and executed with absolutely the right tone.
Kudos to the production for its attention to detail. Juliet Welch is delightful as Lotte, her German inflection sounding quite natural. Her multidimensional character is the real protagonist of the play and it feels like she has carefully considered her every word and gesture. When leaving the show, I was surprised to find out that the character of Lotte was inspired by the mother of set designer Alan Munden. Upon learning this, I decided to give up on holding those tears back. I know I won’t be the only one to leave the Pleasance looking down to avoid revealing my emotions.
Everything Theatre
Marianna Meloni
Dinah likes to describe herself as a ‘monster’ teenager. Abandoned at birth by her 15 year old mother, she goes from home to home until the day she is assigned to Lotte, an elderly and rather odd lady, who seems particularly keen on fostering her. Both women have wounds to heal and both find closure through experiencing their own pain from a different point of view. A series of flashbacks guides the audience through both women’s stories in this well-balanced and accomplished production.
The character of Lotte symbolises a whole generation of young migrants who were taken away from their families during the Second World War and sent to England to escape the Nazis. This is a difficult topic to confront and it would be easy to fall into meaningless rhetoric but Transports avoids this. Instead, we are presented with mere facts and with the hardship of two estranged women in need of a real family.
The set is minimal yet extremely functional; two sections of upstanding train track as a backdrop recall the implications of the title, while also serving as home furniture and a projection surface. Unfortunately it was not easy to see all these projections from my seat to the side, but this didn’t hugely affect my enjoyment of the piece. Every corner of the stage is in use and the two actresses move from one side to the other, smoothly facilitating scene changes.
The lighting, the music and the sound effects provide essential contributions to the performance. Never too loud and never inappropriate, they help to frame each sequence and mark the distinction between the two parallel lives well. Ambient noise is also used to set the background when there is a change of location. Despite the moving topic, writer and director Jon Welch doesn’t miss a chance to add a funny touch, which helps to hold back the tears on more than one occasion. The dialogue is beautifully polished and executed with absolutely the right tone.
Kudos to the production for its attention to detail. Juliet Welch is delightful as Lotte, her German inflection sounding quite natural. Her multidimensional character is the real protagonist of the play and it feels like she has carefully considered her every word and gesture. When leaving the show, I was surprised to find out that the character of Lotte was inspired by the mother of set designer Alan Munden. Upon learning this, I decided to give up on holding those tears back. I know I won’t be the only one to leave the Pleasance looking down to avoid revealing my emotions.
****
The Upcoming
Laura Foulger
Transports, the first of Pipeline Theatre’s three plays, is currently enjoying a re-tour throughout the spring, bringing with it solid proof that this fledgling company has had a strong and singular voice from the start. With stories realer than life, characters that demand our deepest empathy, richly subtextual scripts and seamless set design, each one of their shows is worth dropping everything to see.
Two displaced individuals are thrown together: 49-year old German immigrant Lotte and Dinah, the teenager she takes into her home. Both damaged by their sad histories, their coping mechanisms couldn’t be more different. Lotte displays a desperate optimism that manifests itself in inane chatter, while Dinah is reckless to the point of self-sabotage. Dinah claims to love reading about sex and murder, while Lotte doesn’t even watch films as she doesn’t like to witness “horrible things”. As we switch between the WWII refugee crisis and the late 1970s that provide the backdrops to their respective childhoods, the parallels between women’s lives grow ever more apparent.
Juliet Welch, one of Pipeline Theatre’s founders, plays the role of Lotte with aplomb. She switches from unbearable chatterbox to little-girl-lost with natural ease, all with a nuanced accent that is RP English with just a tell-tale hint of German. Welch also takes on several side characters with thorough well-roundedness. Hannah Stephens is heartbreaking as the impassive Dinah, letting us see just enough through her armour to glimpse the mess within.
Writer Jon Welch’s script is peppered with tender humour, which makes the play’s gradual onslaught of tragedy all the harder to bear. Troubled Dinah uses poetry as an outlet, her monologues all in the form of haikus, sonnets or blank verse: “They wear their smiles as tight as their sphincters,” she sneers.
The set is typically enigmatic. Themes of displacement and unrest are echoed in upright train tracks, departure boards and video of track falling away. Audio has an important part to play: thunderous trains, cruel playground whispers, the meowing of Lotte’s cat Oskar. All these elements converge to create a visceral and indelible experience.
We won’t mention the ending, but suffice to say there’s a hard-hitting surprise for the audience.
The Upcoming
Laura Foulger
Transports, the first of Pipeline Theatre’s three plays, is currently enjoying a re-tour throughout the spring, bringing with it solid proof that this fledgling company has had a strong and singular voice from the start. With stories realer than life, characters that demand our deepest empathy, richly subtextual scripts and seamless set design, each one of their shows is worth dropping everything to see.
Two displaced individuals are thrown together: 49-year old German immigrant Lotte and Dinah, the teenager she takes into her home. Both damaged by their sad histories, their coping mechanisms couldn’t be more different. Lotte displays a desperate optimism that manifests itself in inane chatter, while Dinah is reckless to the point of self-sabotage. Dinah claims to love reading about sex and murder, while Lotte doesn’t even watch films as she doesn’t like to witness “horrible things”. As we switch between the WWII refugee crisis and the late 1970s that provide the backdrops to their respective childhoods, the parallels between women’s lives grow ever more apparent.
Juliet Welch, one of Pipeline Theatre’s founders, plays the role of Lotte with aplomb. She switches from unbearable chatterbox to little-girl-lost with natural ease, all with a nuanced accent that is RP English with just a tell-tale hint of German. Welch also takes on several side characters with thorough well-roundedness. Hannah Stephens is heartbreaking as the impassive Dinah, letting us see just enough through her armour to glimpse the mess within.
Writer Jon Welch’s script is peppered with tender humour, which makes the play’s gradual onslaught of tragedy all the harder to bear. Troubled Dinah uses poetry as an outlet, her monologues all in the form of haikus, sonnets or blank verse: “They wear their smiles as tight as their sphincters,” she sneers.
The set is typically enigmatic. Themes of displacement and unrest are echoed in upright train tracks, departure boards and video of track falling away. Audio has an important part to play: thunderous trains, cruel playground whispers, the meowing of Lotte’s cat Oskar. All these elements converge to create a visceral and indelible experience.
We won’t mention the ending, but suffice to say there’s a hard-hitting surprise for the audience.
****
Theatre Bath
Petra Schofield
January 30, 2016Following the mesmerising production of Streaming at The Ustinov last year, Pipeline Theatre returns with Transports. Once again their distinctive style and exquisite design sets them at the top of the small scale touring theatre ladder.
There are few companies who have such compelling stories to tell or do so in such a beautifully nuanced and unique way.
The story is carried with great conviction and raw honesty by Juliet Welch (Lotte, Mrs. Weston & Lotte’s mother) and Hannah Stephens (Dinah & Young Lotte.) The multi role playing is directed with great precision (Jon Welch) where the switches between Dinah and Young Lotte are particularly effective. Here the generations are breached with ease, charging the space with great emotion whilst holding a mirror to their experiences reflecting on their differences as well as their similarities.
The script is well crafted too; the use of poetry allows Dinah to find her teenage voice, to fight her complex world and to express the entrenched emotional damage in her soul.
Juliet Welch captures the endless chatter of the older Lotte and her desperate wish to support Dinah in a sensitive way. The desire to “make things better” is heart breaking whilst her continued strength and determination is constantly inspiring.
This will be a success for Pipeline not only for the breathtaking scene at the end of the play which reinforces the poignancy and relevance of the current refugee crisis alongside the extraordinary experience, resilience and inspiration of Liesl Munden. The impact of this moment is palpable but quite simply this is excellent theatre, thought provoking and challenging throughout and should not be missed
Theatre Bath
Petra Schofield
January 30, 2016Following the mesmerising production of Streaming at The Ustinov last year, Pipeline Theatre returns with Transports. Once again their distinctive style and exquisite design sets them at the top of the small scale touring theatre ladder.
There are few companies who have such compelling stories to tell or do so in such a beautifully nuanced and unique way.
The story is carried with great conviction and raw honesty by Juliet Welch (Lotte, Mrs. Weston & Lotte’s mother) and Hannah Stephens (Dinah & Young Lotte.) The multi role playing is directed with great precision (Jon Welch) where the switches between Dinah and Young Lotte are particularly effective. Here the generations are breached with ease, charging the space with great emotion whilst holding a mirror to their experiences reflecting on their differences as well as their similarities.
The script is well crafted too; the use of poetry allows Dinah to find her teenage voice, to fight her complex world and to express the entrenched emotional damage in her soul.
Juliet Welch captures the endless chatter of the older Lotte and her desperate wish to support Dinah in a sensitive way. The desire to “make things better” is heart breaking whilst her continued strength and determination is constantly inspiring.
This will be a success for Pipeline not only for the breathtaking scene at the end of the play which reinforces the poignancy and relevance of the current refugee crisis alongside the extraordinary experience, resilience and inspiration of Liesl Munden. The impact of this moment is palpable but quite simply this is excellent theatre, thought provoking and challenging throughout and should not be missed
*****
West Briton
Lee Trewhela
With the plight of migrants rapidly losing its humanity among a rush of fear and prejudice across Europe, the
re-staging of the first play by Cornish company Pipeline is timely.
However, this isn't a story of people fleeing the Middle East but from Europe itself. Deftly written by Jon Welch – arguably the leading playwright in Cornwall right now – the spark of the tale lies with Pipeline designer Alan Munden's mother Liesl, who was on one of the last Kindertransport to England during the war. She was 15, her parents were murdered in Minsk. She later read her poems of being a holocaust refugee to schoolchildren. Her story is transplanted to Lotte, an old (we learn that 49 was old in the England of 1973), eccentric chatterbox, who wages a daily war with missing mints in her handbag. She keeps her Kindertransport past buried in a trunk in her attic.
The play begins with Lotte waiting on a railway station for Dinah, a volatile and provocative 15-year-old she has fostered from a care home. Separated by a generation, they share troubled but very different pasts – a girl without a family and a woman who migrated from Germany as her own family faced death in the concentration camps. As is the way with a play like this, they clash and the whole thing pivots on a devastating act.
The two actresses are sublime – Juliet Welch (who started and ran Constantine's arts hub The Tolmen Centre for five years) is wonderful as the dotty cat woman wildly cleaning her nick-nacks as she reminisces about life as a butcher's wife, adjusting to loneliness in the 1970s and claiming that Tony Blackburn is a very funny man.Hannah Stephens, who is perhaps best known for her sultry Miranda in Miracle Theatre's Tempest, is Juliet's equal – initially taciturn as troubled Dinah she soon burst forth with a precocious sexuality but also a hidden vulnerability.
With its simple yet effective set, encompassing sound-world and minimal use of film (a twirling ice skater heightens one powerful monologue), Transports is a stunning and memorable piece of theatre. It's refreshing that a Cornish company has made that rare work – a play with broad themes, none of which talk directly about Cornwall or indeed talk in a Cornish accent.
The play is transported, naturally, to London's Pleasance Theatre from February 28 to March 12 before returning for a couple more Cornish dates at Mullion School on March 18 and Falmouth's Poly on March 19. You have to see it.
West Briton
Lee Trewhela
With the plight of migrants rapidly losing its humanity among a rush of fear and prejudice across Europe, the
re-staging of the first play by Cornish company Pipeline is timely.
However, this isn't a story of people fleeing the Middle East but from Europe itself. Deftly written by Jon Welch – arguably the leading playwright in Cornwall right now – the spark of the tale lies with Pipeline designer Alan Munden's mother Liesl, who was on one of the last Kindertransport to England during the war. She was 15, her parents were murdered in Minsk. She later read her poems of being a holocaust refugee to schoolchildren. Her story is transplanted to Lotte, an old (we learn that 49 was old in the England of 1973), eccentric chatterbox, who wages a daily war with missing mints in her handbag. She keeps her Kindertransport past buried in a trunk in her attic.
The play begins with Lotte waiting on a railway station for Dinah, a volatile and provocative 15-year-old she has fostered from a care home. Separated by a generation, they share troubled but very different pasts – a girl without a family and a woman who migrated from Germany as her own family faced death in the concentration camps. As is the way with a play like this, they clash and the whole thing pivots on a devastating act.
The two actresses are sublime – Juliet Welch (who started and ran Constantine's arts hub The Tolmen Centre for five years) is wonderful as the dotty cat woman wildly cleaning her nick-nacks as she reminisces about life as a butcher's wife, adjusting to loneliness in the 1970s and claiming that Tony Blackburn is a very funny man.Hannah Stephens, who is perhaps best known for her sultry Miranda in Miracle Theatre's Tempest, is Juliet's equal – initially taciturn as troubled Dinah she soon burst forth with a precocious sexuality but also a hidden vulnerability.
With its simple yet effective set, encompassing sound-world and minimal use of film (a twirling ice skater heightens one powerful monologue), Transports is a stunning and memorable piece of theatre. It's refreshing that a Cornish company has made that rare work – a play with broad themes, none of which talk directly about Cornwall or indeed talk in a Cornish accent.
The play is transported, naturally, to London's Pleasance Theatre from February 28 to March 12 before returning for a couple more Cornish dates at Mullion School on March 18 and Falmouth's Poly on March 19. You have to see it.
Hereford Times
ONE of the great joys of The Courtyard is the opportunity it affords to experience some truly outstanding work, work that may not be streamed live to millions on the big screen - though it should be - and which has the power to stop you in your tracks.
And last week, Pipeline Theatre delivered just such a piece in Transports, an intricately and cleverly constructed drama which draws you in to the story being played out on stage at the same time as it tells stories on an altogether bigger scale.
Inspired by the story of designer Alan Munden's mother Liesl, who was on one of the last Kindertransports to England during the war, Transports starts with another arrival on a train, as 15-year-old Dinah comes to live with Lotte. Dinah is trouble - 'bad' she insists, countering any attempt on Lotte's part to contradict her, and she's got all the ammunition to prove it. Rude and silent by turns, Dinah is already damaged beyond repair, but that can't stop us hoping that Lotte's eccentrically sensitive care will win her over. And the two have more in common than Dinah imagines and her mockery turns to a glimmer of empathy when she discovers Lotte's past packed away in a trunk.
It's a measure of how powerfully Transports affected the audience that the lights going up for the interval were greeted with a stunned silence. Similarly the end was met with silence for a beat or two, as if we needed to distance ourselves from a story that had felt heartbreakingly real before applauding the company that had brought it to life.
Just two actors - Juliet Welch and Hannah Stephens - were on stage, inhabiting women of different generations, Juliet playing Lotte, Mrs Weston and Lotte's mother, while Hannah was Dinah and the young Lotte, every one clearly and convincingly characterised, with the transitions beautifully effected to highlight the echoes resonating through the years.
Contained in a simple set, with only two actors, the story told sparingly with not a word wasted as it inexorably moves towards its devastating conclusion, Transports is a tragedy that stays in the mind for days.
ONE of the great joys of The Courtyard is the opportunity it affords to experience some truly outstanding work, work that may not be streamed live to millions on the big screen - though it should be - and which has the power to stop you in your tracks.
And last week, Pipeline Theatre delivered just such a piece in Transports, an intricately and cleverly constructed drama which draws you in to the story being played out on stage at the same time as it tells stories on an altogether bigger scale.
Inspired by the story of designer Alan Munden's mother Liesl, who was on one of the last Kindertransports to England during the war, Transports starts with another arrival on a train, as 15-year-old Dinah comes to live with Lotte. Dinah is trouble - 'bad' she insists, countering any attempt on Lotte's part to contradict her, and she's got all the ammunition to prove it. Rude and silent by turns, Dinah is already damaged beyond repair, but that can't stop us hoping that Lotte's eccentrically sensitive care will win her over. And the two have more in common than Dinah imagines and her mockery turns to a glimmer of empathy when she discovers Lotte's past packed away in a trunk.
It's a measure of how powerfully Transports affected the audience that the lights going up for the interval were greeted with a stunned silence. Similarly the end was met with silence for a beat or two, as if we needed to distance ourselves from a story that had felt heartbreakingly real before applauding the company that had brought it to life.
Just two actors - Juliet Welch and Hannah Stephens - were on stage, inhabiting women of different generations, Juliet playing Lotte, Mrs Weston and Lotte's mother, while Hannah was Dinah and the young Lotte, every one clearly and convincingly characterised, with the transitions beautifully effected to highlight the echoes resonating through the years.
Contained in a simple set, with only two actors, the story told sparingly with not a word wasted as it inexorably moves towards its devastating conclusion, Transports is a tragedy that stays in the mind for days.
*****
London Theatre
Chris Omaweng
The way certain sections of the British media have covered evacuations of Jewish children in the late 1930s from the evil of the Third Reich, anyone would have been mistaken for thinking Sir Nicholas Winton was singularly responsible for the whole Kindertransport operation. But there were many people who mucked in to make it happen, and even a rudimentary look at the facts and the scale of the operation would make anyone realise that it’s no wonder Winton remained guarded and almost embarrassed by the attention focused on him: what about everyone else, and more importantly for him, what about the people whose lives were saved?
Sir Nicholas, I think, would have been pleased with Transports, which isn’t so much about the logistics of moving so many Jewish German children to Britain as it is about the life and times of Lotte (Juliet Welch), whose foster child Dinah (Hannah Stephens) forces her, debatably inadvertently, to confront the demons of the past. You’ll have gathered that the show is not entirely set in the late 1930s – it’s not quite ‘present day’ either, mind you.
Proceedings rattle through at a steady pace, and only occasionally things move a little too slowly, and a running gag about peppermints may or may not outlast its welcome, dependent on your sense of humour. I personally found it hilarious – some others in the audience weren’t quite as responsive.
Factually speaking, this show doesn’t really tell me anything new. I have long been fascinated by stories if Holocaust survivors and other tales of triumph over severe adversity. But this still makes for a very absorbing production – perhaps a familiarity with the general themes explored allowed me to sit back and get immersed in proceedings. Either way, I hesitate to say I ‘enjoyed’ this, at least not in the same way I would ‘enjoy’ a good comedy or feel-good musical. I am, however, more than satisfied with this production, and am pleased to have had the privilege of seeing it.
The narrative does not follow a linear progression, which a couple of fellow audience members found jarring. I didn’t have a problem with the show flitting between generations, and the transformation of Lotte (pronounced ‘Lott-uh’) to Mrs Weston, Lotte’s wartime foster carer, and Dinah to ‘Young Lotte’ as she was when she first came to Britain, is extraordinary. The switch happens so quickly and seamlessly back and forth quite a few times over the course of the evening, and these scene changes are a marvel to watch in their own right. There are credible depictions, too, of different places – without, I hasten to add, an elaborate set.
There’s no melodrama in a skilled exploration of some hard-hitting issues, including the psychological impact of abandonment and appropriate responses to vehement opposition. It came across as unsentimental – by which I do not mean ‘cold’, but stoic and realistic. It’s a difficult balance to achieve, but Cornwall-based Pipeline Theatre does it flawlessly here.
The use of different literary styles including blank verse and sonnets, even if such devices are made too explicitly clear, helps add extra poignancy to the words being said. Carrying this sort of multi-layered story is not exactly a walk in the park, and may well have been less successfully executed had it not been for the talented and stellar duo of Welch and Stephens, neither of whom are ever off-stage for very long. This is a strong and admirable drama, helping its audiences to remember that problems encountered in life are more universal than we may sometimes think.
Review by Chris Omaweng
London Theatre
Chris Omaweng
The way certain sections of the British media have covered evacuations of Jewish children in the late 1930s from the evil of the Third Reich, anyone would have been mistaken for thinking Sir Nicholas Winton was singularly responsible for the whole Kindertransport operation. But there were many people who mucked in to make it happen, and even a rudimentary look at the facts and the scale of the operation would make anyone realise that it’s no wonder Winton remained guarded and almost embarrassed by the attention focused on him: what about everyone else, and more importantly for him, what about the people whose lives were saved?
Sir Nicholas, I think, would have been pleased with Transports, which isn’t so much about the logistics of moving so many Jewish German children to Britain as it is about the life and times of Lotte (Juliet Welch), whose foster child Dinah (Hannah Stephens) forces her, debatably inadvertently, to confront the demons of the past. You’ll have gathered that the show is not entirely set in the late 1930s – it’s not quite ‘present day’ either, mind you.
Proceedings rattle through at a steady pace, and only occasionally things move a little too slowly, and a running gag about peppermints may or may not outlast its welcome, dependent on your sense of humour. I personally found it hilarious – some others in the audience weren’t quite as responsive.
Factually speaking, this show doesn’t really tell me anything new. I have long been fascinated by stories if Holocaust survivors and other tales of triumph over severe adversity. But this still makes for a very absorbing production – perhaps a familiarity with the general themes explored allowed me to sit back and get immersed in proceedings. Either way, I hesitate to say I ‘enjoyed’ this, at least not in the same way I would ‘enjoy’ a good comedy or feel-good musical. I am, however, more than satisfied with this production, and am pleased to have had the privilege of seeing it.
The narrative does not follow a linear progression, which a couple of fellow audience members found jarring. I didn’t have a problem with the show flitting between generations, and the transformation of Lotte (pronounced ‘Lott-uh’) to Mrs Weston, Lotte’s wartime foster carer, and Dinah to ‘Young Lotte’ as she was when she first came to Britain, is extraordinary. The switch happens so quickly and seamlessly back and forth quite a few times over the course of the evening, and these scene changes are a marvel to watch in their own right. There are credible depictions, too, of different places – without, I hasten to add, an elaborate set.
There’s no melodrama in a skilled exploration of some hard-hitting issues, including the psychological impact of abandonment and appropriate responses to vehement opposition. It came across as unsentimental – by which I do not mean ‘cold’, but stoic and realistic. It’s a difficult balance to achieve, but Cornwall-based Pipeline Theatre does it flawlessly here.
The use of different literary styles including blank verse and sonnets, even if such devices are made too explicitly clear, helps add extra poignancy to the words being said. Carrying this sort of multi-layered story is not exactly a walk in the park, and may well have been less successfully executed had it not been for the talented and stellar duo of Welch and Stephens, neither of whom are ever off-stage for very long. This is a strong and admirable drama, helping its audiences to remember that problems encountered in life are more universal than we may sometimes think.
Review by Chris Omaweng
****
Stage Talk Magazine
Graham Wyles
Amidst all the national hand-wringing over the fate of those forlorn, native North Africans and Middle-Easterners fleeing the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by bloody tyrants and religious fanatics, it is far too easy to overlook the individual tragedies and lifelong psychological scarring accompanying such events, that in truth, only a comfortable armchair can ignore. How timely then that a play so relevant yet tangentially set should make its way onto our stage. An odd kind of reversal in which the immigrant plays host to a native and offers uncommon succour forms the plot in Jon Welch’s touring production, set in the East Anglia of 1973.
The immigrant in this case is a middle aged woman who came to the UK under the Kindertransport initiative in which Jewish children were given passage from a hostile Germany and placed with sympathetic families in the UK. In Transports a ‘hostile’ teenage girl is placed in the foster-care of Lotte, a native German, whose parents were killed by the Nazis in one of their extermination camps. The play is based on the experience and poems of the designer, Alan Munden’s, own mother, Liesl Munden, who was herself, at the age of fifteen, brought to England in the latter stages of the Kindertransport.
Writer, Jon Welch, skilfully avoids the grim, well rehearsed details of that dark passage of history and concentrates instead on the psychological and emotional effects of displacement and parental loss on two quite disparate women. Lotte is thus in a unique position to sympathize with the stroppy, Dinah who was separated at birth from her own mother, a sixteen year old Irish girl who later committed suicide and who has so far trashed the best efforts of a parade of foster carers.
Striking back at she’s-not-quite-sure-what, for reasons she probably could not articulate, Dinah is a rebel with a deep scar. Branded a ‘slut’ by her peer group on account of her aggressive and self-destructive promiscuity, she resists the patient and troubled tolerance of Lotte as she tries to penetrate the carapace which exhibits as a kind of emotional void, but in fact hides, we suppose, a deep sense of loss and unresolved feelings of rejection.
Welch (who also directs) as in the best theatre, shows rather than explains and so we learn about the two women through the emotional arm wrestling between two equally determined and damaged women. As Lotte says, ‘The camps never go away’. The acting is faultless in this demanding two-hander with Juliet Welch playing Lotte and her mother with Hannah Stephens taking the young Lotte and Dinah. Both actresses giving well delineated and emotionally fluent performances in each of their characters.
Alan and Jude Munden’s set comprises two sets of rails which provide a looming reminder of the death camps and the journeys each of the women has been on.
Stage Talk Magazine
Graham Wyles
Amidst all the national hand-wringing over the fate of those forlorn, native North Africans and Middle-Easterners fleeing the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by bloody tyrants and religious fanatics, it is far too easy to overlook the individual tragedies and lifelong psychological scarring accompanying such events, that in truth, only a comfortable armchair can ignore. How timely then that a play so relevant yet tangentially set should make its way onto our stage. An odd kind of reversal in which the immigrant plays host to a native and offers uncommon succour forms the plot in Jon Welch’s touring production, set in the East Anglia of 1973.
The immigrant in this case is a middle aged woman who came to the UK under the Kindertransport initiative in which Jewish children were given passage from a hostile Germany and placed with sympathetic families in the UK. In Transports a ‘hostile’ teenage girl is placed in the foster-care of Lotte, a native German, whose parents were killed by the Nazis in one of their extermination camps. The play is based on the experience and poems of the designer, Alan Munden’s, own mother, Liesl Munden, who was herself, at the age of fifteen, brought to England in the latter stages of the Kindertransport.
Writer, Jon Welch, skilfully avoids the grim, well rehearsed details of that dark passage of history and concentrates instead on the psychological and emotional effects of displacement and parental loss on two quite disparate women. Lotte is thus in a unique position to sympathize with the stroppy, Dinah who was separated at birth from her own mother, a sixteen year old Irish girl who later committed suicide and who has so far trashed the best efforts of a parade of foster carers.
Striking back at she’s-not-quite-sure-what, for reasons she probably could not articulate, Dinah is a rebel with a deep scar. Branded a ‘slut’ by her peer group on account of her aggressive and self-destructive promiscuity, she resists the patient and troubled tolerance of Lotte as she tries to penetrate the carapace which exhibits as a kind of emotional void, but in fact hides, we suppose, a deep sense of loss and unresolved feelings of rejection.
Welch (who also directs) as in the best theatre, shows rather than explains and so we learn about the two women through the emotional arm wrestling between two equally determined and damaged women. As Lotte says, ‘The camps never go away’. The acting is faultless in this demanding two-hander with Juliet Welch playing Lotte and her mother with Hannah Stephens taking the young Lotte and Dinah. Both actresses giving well delineated and emotionally fluent performances in each of their characters.
Alan and Jude Munden’s set comprises two sets of rails which provide a looming reminder of the death camps and the journeys each of the women has been on.
Daily Echo
Brendan McCuskerThis new play, written and directed by Jon Welch, is compelling, heartbreaking, and cuttingly thought-provoking.Transports tells the story of Dinah, a troubled and difficult 15-year-old who is shunted into her final foster home in the 1970s. Her new foster-mum Lotte has a foreign accent, verbal diarrhoea, and a trunk full of secret memories.The two characters try to adjust to each other, but their lives and histories intertwine, collide and splinter with shocking consequences.
The atmospheric set design by Cornwall’s Eden Project’s Alan Munden – featuring two vertical railway lines symbolising the characters’ journeys and parallel problems – includes subtle living rooms, bedrooms and the secretive loft.Shifting seamlessly between Lotte’s Kindertransport from Nazi Germany to England in the 1940s, and Dinah’s foster homes and schools in the 1970s, the period details are utterly convincing, particularly the use of radio programmes from Forties favourites to Tony Blackburn’s breakfast show.
Mesmeric acting from Juliet Welch and Hannah Stephens in multiple roles, blends with riveting overhead visuals, provocative crowd vocals, and movingly poignant piano sound effects.The narrative is pacy, onstage costume changes creatively effective, lighting extremely evocative.Yet this powerful drama also resonates with today’s refugee crisis, as Europe struggles with mass migration from Syria, both trying to cope with geographical, cultural and emotional displacement.
Brendan McCuskerThis new play, written and directed by Jon Welch, is compelling, heartbreaking, and cuttingly thought-provoking.Transports tells the story of Dinah, a troubled and difficult 15-year-old who is shunted into her final foster home in the 1970s. Her new foster-mum Lotte has a foreign accent, verbal diarrhoea, and a trunk full of secret memories.The two characters try to adjust to each other, but their lives and histories intertwine, collide and splinter with shocking consequences.
The atmospheric set design by Cornwall’s Eden Project’s Alan Munden – featuring two vertical railway lines symbolising the characters’ journeys and parallel problems – includes subtle living rooms, bedrooms and the secretive loft.Shifting seamlessly between Lotte’s Kindertransport from Nazi Germany to England in the 1940s, and Dinah’s foster homes and schools in the 1970s, the period details are utterly convincing, particularly the use of radio programmes from Forties favourites to Tony Blackburn’s breakfast show.
Mesmeric acting from Juliet Welch and Hannah Stephens in multiple roles, blends with riveting overhead visuals, provocative crowd vocals, and movingly poignant piano sound effects.The narrative is pacy, onstage costume changes creatively effective, lighting extremely evocative.Yet this powerful drama also resonates with today’s refugee crisis, as Europe struggles with mass migration from Syria, both trying to cope with geographical, cultural and emotional displacement.
A Younger Theatre
Laura Foulger
Transports is effortless. It is beautiful, heartbreaking and thought-provoking. Every moment of it is about connection, about consistency and, most importantly, about love. The story of 16-year-old Dinah and her foster mother Lotte, Transports seamlessly switches between two timelines, giving us an insight into the youth of 1973, shunted around heartlessly, and the youth of the 1940s – and what differences, or perhaps what parallels, one can draw between them. Dinah is threatening, a typical ‘troubled’ child described as having psychopathic tendencies, while Lotte seems dotty, endearing and in some ways the comic relief of the play. As the days tick by, however, we find that this is not quite true and that Lotte’s past is as troubled as Dinah’s, if not quite for the same reasons. We watch these characters over the course of a few days in their lives, trying – or not – to understand each other, and why it is so important to never, never give up. Inspired by the poetry and experiences of German evacuee Liesl Munden, Transports echoes the inhumanity and injustices of people in ways that one play should not be able to document with such a short running time (just over two hours, including an interval). It deals sensitively with all kinds of issues including abandonment, psychological and physical trauma, and everything in between. It is, therefore, not a play for those looking for a light evening out.
There are, however, veins of comedy running through the piece. As Lotte, Juliet Welch displays wonderfully neurotic comic timing, alongside an ability to play a loneliness which is strangely beautiful: the hollowed shell of a woman who finds a new life in protecting her foster daughter. Transitioning between Lotte and the various other characters who appear as the piece unfolds, she is seamless and never breaks character, no matter how big the difference between the personae she assumes. Similarly Anna Munden, related to Liesl and part of the family operation that went into producing this beautiful work, performs incredibly as the psychopathic Dinah and the vulnerable characters between which she transitions.
I have genuinely never seen something so beautifully performed on stage. In such an intimate setting it could be difficult to hold the attention of an audience whilst your partner is changing or moving a part of the set, but it is so seamless that there is nothing one could fault about it. The piece combines cultures and languages, histories and futures, and builds bridges between them to produce an incredible, heartbreaking and captivating story. With twists at every corner, Transports is a sensitive and thoughtful piece, which deals with damage in reasonable and realistic ways without ever engaging in melodrama. It is beautiful and gut-wrenching, but at the same time hopeful and caring. A must-see in a limited run – missing out is missing a lot.
http://www.ayoungertheatre.com
Laura Foulger
Transports is effortless. It is beautiful, heartbreaking and thought-provoking. Every moment of it is about connection, about consistency and, most importantly, about love. The story of 16-year-old Dinah and her foster mother Lotte, Transports seamlessly switches between two timelines, giving us an insight into the youth of 1973, shunted around heartlessly, and the youth of the 1940s – and what differences, or perhaps what parallels, one can draw between them. Dinah is threatening, a typical ‘troubled’ child described as having psychopathic tendencies, while Lotte seems dotty, endearing and in some ways the comic relief of the play. As the days tick by, however, we find that this is not quite true and that Lotte’s past is as troubled as Dinah’s, if not quite for the same reasons. We watch these characters over the course of a few days in their lives, trying – or not – to understand each other, and why it is so important to never, never give up. Inspired by the poetry and experiences of German evacuee Liesl Munden, Transports echoes the inhumanity and injustices of people in ways that one play should not be able to document with such a short running time (just over two hours, including an interval). It deals sensitively with all kinds of issues including abandonment, psychological and physical trauma, and everything in between. It is, therefore, not a play for those looking for a light evening out.
There are, however, veins of comedy running through the piece. As Lotte, Juliet Welch displays wonderfully neurotic comic timing, alongside an ability to play a loneliness which is strangely beautiful: the hollowed shell of a woman who finds a new life in protecting her foster daughter. Transitioning between Lotte and the various other characters who appear as the piece unfolds, she is seamless and never breaks character, no matter how big the difference between the personae she assumes. Similarly Anna Munden, related to Liesl and part of the family operation that went into producing this beautiful work, performs incredibly as the psychopathic Dinah and the vulnerable characters between which she transitions.
I have genuinely never seen something so beautifully performed on stage. In such an intimate setting it could be difficult to hold the attention of an audience whilst your partner is changing or moving a part of the set, but it is so seamless that there is nothing one could fault about it. The piece combines cultures and languages, histories and futures, and builds bridges between them to produce an incredible, heartbreaking and captivating story. With twists at every corner, Transports is a sensitive and thoughtful piece, which deals with damage in reasonable and realistic ways without ever engaging in melodrama. It is beautiful and gut-wrenching, but at the same time hopeful and caring. A must-see in a limited run – missing out is missing a lot.
http://www.ayoungertheatre.com
Reviewsgate
Timothy Ramsden
Large themes in moving small-scale drama.
Pipeline Theatre’s play seems very much a family, or two family, affair. By the end it is even more evidently so, in its action as in its creators. Transports arrives as a revival of Diane Samuels’ 1993 play Kindertransport is due. The two complement each other.
Troubled teenager Dinah starts by seeing Lotte as a tedious old German-Jewish woman trying to do good by fostering her in 1980s Suffolk. Angry and self-destructive, Dinah's power fantasies at her new school contrast actual victimization as, isolated, rebelliously smoking, she retreats to the vertical rail-track sections of Alan Munden’s set – suggesting solidity and transience - for both assertion and protection, repeatedly trying to confirm her low self-esteem by making Lotte reject her.
But Lotte has known worse. What is a brick through the window, in retaliation against Dinah, to someone who remembers the Kristallnacht smashing of Jewish windows across Nazi Germany? Both women’s minds echo with past horrors.
Survival, and the renewal of life, are important. It turns out so for Lotte’s cat Oskar, an important unseen character, and for Dinah. After an action surprisingly compacted within a week, the bittersweet end brings two theatrical coups that lift the spirits (or tug at the heartstrings, according to taste) while revealing the story’s grounding in reality.
Juliet Welch’s Lotte starts on a busily comic note which takes time to settle into the more rounded character of someone patient and resilient - though the early comic gabble and searching through a handbag’s contents reflect a helpful busy-ness and humour in Jon Welch’s script and production.
Anna Munden dons specs for wartime flashbacks, as serious young Lotte, conscientiously learning English in the house where she gradually earns respect, before the authorities resettle her in a Jewish neighbourhood.
As the troubled Dinah, all defiance and refusal, Munden catches the inner flames of resentment, in furiously defiant eyes, and telling details like excessive make-up and inability to handle knife and fork. It’s a blazing performance of an incandescent character, no less intense as Lotte gradually helps her accept the person within the protectively constructed façade of a monster.
Timothy Ramsden
Large themes in moving small-scale drama.
Pipeline Theatre’s play seems very much a family, or two family, affair. By the end it is even more evidently so, in its action as in its creators. Transports arrives as a revival of Diane Samuels’ 1993 play Kindertransport is due. The two complement each other.
Troubled teenager Dinah starts by seeing Lotte as a tedious old German-Jewish woman trying to do good by fostering her in 1980s Suffolk. Angry and self-destructive, Dinah's power fantasies at her new school contrast actual victimization as, isolated, rebelliously smoking, she retreats to the vertical rail-track sections of Alan Munden’s set – suggesting solidity and transience - for both assertion and protection, repeatedly trying to confirm her low self-esteem by making Lotte reject her.
But Lotte has known worse. What is a brick through the window, in retaliation against Dinah, to someone who remembers the Kristallnacht smashing of Jewish windows across Nazi Germany? Both women’s minds echo with past horrors.
Survival, and the renewal of life, are important. It turns out so for Lotte’s cat Oskar, an important unseen character, and for Dinah. After an action surprisingly compacted within a week, the bittersweet end brings two theatrical coups that lift the spirits (or tug at the heartstrings, according to taste) while revealing the story’s grounding in reality.
Juliet Welch’s Lotte starts on a busily comic note which takes time to settle into the more rounded character of someone patient and resilient - though the early comic gabble and searching through a handbag’s contents reflect a helpful busy-ness and humour in Jon Welch’s script and production.
Anna Munden dons specs for wartime flashbacks, as serious young Lotte, conscientiously learning English in the house where she gradually earns respect, before the authorities resettle her in a Jewish neighbourhood.
As the troubled Dinah, all defiance and refusal, Munden catches the inner flames of resentment, in furiously defiant eyes, and telling details like excessive make-up and inability to handle knife and fork. It’s a blazing performance of an incandescent character, no less intense as Lotte gradually helps her accept the person within the protectively constructed façade of a monster.
Cornish Guardian
Fi Read
Thursday also saw me at The Poly in Falmouth to sample Pipeline Theatre’s zesty debut production: Transports. The company might be new, but its members are well-seasoned practitioners in and around the Cornish theatrical ‘kitchen’. A real family affair with Alan and Jude Munden responsible for the superb set design and costume, their ludicrously talented daughter Anna acting alongside the equally adroit Juliet Welch in this powerful two-hander, and an arresting script courtesy of Juliet’s partner and wordsmith extraordinaire Jon Welch.
It’s not a ‘nice’ play; its subject matter is too dark. How can loss, abandonment, playground rape, persecution, Death camps and suicide be anything other than tragic reminders of the worst aspects of human nature? But the sensitive portraits of Lotte, who was sent away by her parents as a naive 15 year-old to England to escape Nazi Germany, and the emotionally damaged Dinah she fosters as a childless widow in later life, are so acutely realised, you can’t help but be drawn into their drama. You can’t help but care.
Like the parallel train tracks onstage representing the two distant but interconnected story threads, I found the echoes and similarities in my own history quite unnerving. I too was motherless and living outside of my family at fifteen. ‘I’m no-one’s daughter, I’m no-one’s friend,’ says Dinah, bringing a lump to mine and everyone else’s throats in the room.
But what I want to know is how Jon, as a writer, manages to get inside the heads of both Lotte and Dinah so perceptively? No mean feat for a bloke, especially given the themes of rejection, alienation, teenage vulnerability, and self-less maternal love and longing. The way in which the two characters interrelate across the cultural and generational gap is deftly done, as are the touches of humour which lift the play above its innate melancholia.
Beyond the words, the tone, visual flavour, archive film footage and scalp hair-raising soundtrack combine to present a very visceral piece of theatre. In Lotte’s teenage English experience it’s always raining, wartime tunes serenade the airwaves, trains are deafening, while 1970s Radio 1cheesy pop and harrowing schoolyard banter mark Dinah’s time.
From the train timetable/destination billboard effect used to denote place and time, to the Jesus figurine and retro carpet sweeper, it was all faultlessly devised. Anna and Juliet’s costume and role changing performances, riveting. While the denouement left me tear-stained and wondering what’s next in the Pipeline? Brave, bold and brilliant, I loved it.
Fi Read
Thursday also saw me at The Poly in Falmouth to sample Pipeline Theatre’s zesty debut production: Transports. The company might be new, but its members are well-seasoned practitioners in and around the Cornish theatrical ‘kitchen’. A real family affair with Alan and Jude Munden responsible for the superb set design and costume, their ludicrously talented daughter Anna acting alongside the equally adroit Juliet Welch in this powerful two-hander, and an arresting script courtesy of Juliet’s partner and wordsmith extraordinaire Jon Welch.
It’s not a ‘nice’ play; its subject matter is too dark. How can loss, abandonment, playground rape, persecution, Death camps and suicide be anything other than tragic reminders of the worst aspects of human nature? But the sensitive portraits of Lotte, who was sent away by her parents as a naive 15 year-old to England to escape Nazi Germany, and the emotionally damaged Dinah she fosters as a childless widow in later life, are so acutely realised, you can’t help but be drawn into their drama. You can’t help but care.
Like the parallel train tracks onstage representing the two distant but interconnected story threads, I found the echoes and similarities in my own history quite unnerving. I too was motherless and living outside of my family at fifteen. ‘I’m no-one’s daughter, I’m no-one’s friend,’ says Dinah, bringing a lump to mine and everyone else’s throats in the room.
But what I want to know is how Jon, as a writer, manages to get inside the heads of both Lotte and Dinah so perceptively? No mean feat for a bloke, especially given the themes of rejection, alienation, teenage vulnerability, and self-less maternal love and longing. The way in which the two characters interrelate across the cultural and generational gap is deftly done, as are the touches of humour which lift the play above its innate melancholia.
Beyond the words, the tone, visual flavour, archive film footage and scalp hair-raising soundtrack combine to present a very visceral piece of theatre. In Lotte’s teenage English experience it’s always raining, wartime tunes serenade the airwaves, trains are deafening, while 1970s Radio 1cheesy pop and harrowing schoolyard banter mark Dinah’s time.
From the train timetable/destination billboard effect used to denote place and time, to the Jesus figurine and retro carpet sweeper, it was all faultlessly devised. Anna and Juliet’s costume and role changing performances, riveting. While the denouement left me tear-stained and wondering what’s next in the Pipeline? Brave, bold and brilliant, I loved it.
Industry reviews
Ben Monks, Co Artistic Director at Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Gdn
Many congratulations on Transports; it's an incredibly beautiful, powerful and moving piece, and the understatement of your work, and the performances, I think treats difficult subject matter exceptionally well (it would be so easy to do too much...) Thrilled to have the show at the TBT, and that it's having such a good week; and do hope this can be a stimulus to future touring .
http://www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk/
Tim Yealland, Artistic Associate, English Touring Opera
For me the most remarkable aspect of Transports is the understated articulation of the meeting of the lives of two women, one very young, the other mature, but both similarly scarred by circumstance. The fact that this scarring also has a historical context gives incredible depth to the subtle and moving changes in the dynamic of the relationship. The writing, the two performances, the design, all combine to create a stunningly immersive theatrical experience.
Wynne Weldon, Arts Blogger
…a moving, immaculately written, designed and acted piece that deserves as much attention as it can get... The performances… are never less than utterly authoritative. The two women own the stage… Funny, but terrifically moving… I found myself weeping.
http://www.wynnwheldon.com/2013/09/transports-by-jon-welch.html
Marston Bloom, writer of Hustle, Vera, Hotel Babylon and New Tricks
I have been to a dozen acclaimed plays this year at the Donmar, Court and West End. Transports bests them all. Fresh, clear, engaging, and highly skilled in its delivery. I am very jealous!
Charlie Pugh, Artistic Director, the Tolmen Centre
First – without any sort of hyperbole, I thought Transports was completely wonderful ... the whole thing built on the platform of Jon’s writing and (quite literally) the Munden set, the overall design, the performances, the lovely links to the real life family story, the interweaving of real and fictional generations, pathos and humour, the wondrous ending - just so much to marvel at – and congratulate you on: beyond any words I can assemble. So thank you all so much. A massive achievement.
Many congratulations on Transports; it's an incredibly beautiful, powerful and moving piece, and the understatement of your work, and the performances, I think treats difficult subject matter exceptionally well (it would be so easy to do too much...) Thrilled to have the show at the TBT, and that it's having such a good week; and do hope this can be a stimulus to future touring .
http://www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk/
Tim Yealland, Artistic Associate, English Touring Opera
For me the most remarkable aspect of Transports is the understated articulation of the meeting of the lives of two women, one very young, the other mature, but both similarly scarred by circumstance. The fact that this scarring also has a historical context gives incredible depth to the subtle and moving changes in the dynamic of the relationship. The writing, the two performances, the design, all combine to create a stunningly immersive theatrical experience.
Wynne Weldon, Arts Blogger
…a moving, immaculately written, designed and acted piece that deserves as much attention as it can get... The performances… are never less than utterly authoritative. The two women own the stage… Funny, but terrifically moving… I found myself weeping.
http://www.wynnwheldon.com/2013/09/transports-by-jon-welch.html
Marston Bloom, writer of Hustle, Vera, Hotel Babylon and New Tricks
I have been to a dozen acclaimed plays this year at the Donmar, Court and West End. Transports bests them all. Fresh, clear, engaging, and highly skilled in its delivery. I am very jealous!
Charlie Pugh, Artistic Director, the Tolmen Centre
First – without any sort of hyperbole, I thought Transports was completely wonderful ... the whole thing built on the platform of Jon’s writing and (quite literally) the Munden set, the overall design, the performances, the lovely links to the real life family story, the interweaving of real and fictional generations, pathos and humour, the wondrous ending - just so much to marvel at – and congratulate you on: beyond any words I can assemble. So thank you all so much. A massive achievement.