Review – KINDERTRANSPORT at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Tuesday, March 11 to Saturday, March 15, 2014.

FAIRYTALE and fact both ensure this intense probe into human relationships - in particular that between mother and daughter, provides a fascinating, if not riveting watch.

The rise of the evil Nazi Party and the Holocaust that followed are the backdrop to Diane Samuels’ moving play which effortlessly criss-crosses time from those dark days of the late 1930s to the 1980s.

It deals with the scars left in the minds of the thousands of Jewish children evacuated to England from Europe in the late 1930s as war loomed, and one child in particular, for whom a dark folk tale about the child-stealing Rat Catcher resonated so strongly.

It followed her from the emotional upheaval of leaving her parents in Hamburg, to her new home in Manchester and through her new life as it unfolded. Always lurking somewhere in the shadows was that haunting fear.

Eva, who was nine when she travelled alone to England, is superbly played by Gabrielle Dempsey as she stylishly grew her into a confident 17-year-old.

Andrew Hall’s directing also flushes out memorable performances from Maggie Steed, as warm-hearted Lil, Eva’s adoptive mother; Janet Dibley, who plays an Anglicised Eva in later life as Evelyn – determined to keep her past secret but struggling to fight off the demons; and Rosie Holden, as her daughter Faith, who discovers papers revealing the tragic events of almost half-a-century ago and a mother she didn’t really know. It all explores relationships as they are tested to the limit.

Emma Deegan is excellent too as the anxious mother doing her best to ensure her daughter escapes the horrors that befell so many in the concentration camps, while Paul Lancaster was more than eye-catching in his various roles including the Rat Catcher, a Nazi soldier and a Goose-stepping English postie.

A marked feature of Juliet Shillingford’s splendid ‘time-travelling’ set, which also doubled as a train, is the considerably poignant image of hundreds of pairs of shoes stuffed onto shelves beneath the raised attic room set. A stark reminder of some of the unspeakable atrocities inflicted upon unfortunate civilians.

The title of the play actually refers to the trains that conveyed some 10,000 Jewish children from Germany just before the Second World War to Holland and on to Britain where they were re-homed.

Emotions are run ragged as events unfold, generations clash – baffled by abandonment and denial, while the instinct for self-preservation and fulfilment surfaces. Complex and classic, it ought not to be missed.