This solo show with music might well be retitled A Voyage Round My Mother. In the course of 90 minutes, Mona Golabek tells the story of her mother, Lisa Jura, who came to England in 1938 as part of the Kindertransport, which saw the mass evacuation of Jewish children, and ardently pursued her dedication to the piano. It’s a moving story even if it bypasses some of the complexities of its subject.
Its originality lies in the fact that Golabek, in becoming her mother, demonstrates her own pianistic skills. The story starts in Vienna in 1938, with the 14-year-old Lisa assiduously practising her favourite piece, the Grieg Piano Concerto, in the hope of one day performing in the Musikverein. But, after the horrors of Kristallnacht, Lisa finds herself one of the 10,000 Jewish children evacuated to England. What follows is a story of determined survival. Abandoning a Sussex manor house where she is not allowed to play the piano, Lisa ends up in a refugee-home in north London, where her skills are carefully nurtured. Even when the home is badly bombed, she never loses sight of her dream and achieves a music scholarship which eventually leads to her debut as a concert pianist.
Diane Samuels’s 1993 play, Kindertransport, gives us a far more comprehensive picture of the stresses faced by Jewish children and, in particular, of the pressure to abandon their faith. The language also rarely rises to the momentousness of the occasion: “We sat in silence listening to his regal voice,” Lisa says of George VI’s national address about the war, whereas his recorded tones are edged with a very human apprehension. But the strength of the piece lies in Lisa’s belief in the fortifying power of music: even in the Sussex mansion, she steals to the piano by night to silently run her fingers over the keyboard and, to pay her way through college, plays American dance music for visiting servicemen.
Mona Golabek’s identification with her mother is so total we almost forget we are listening to a filial reconstruction. She also plays the varied piano pieces with great flair, although we hardly need an image of Beethoven to be projected on to the stage’s surrounding picture frames when she gives us the Moonlight Sonata. But Hershey Felder’s production is generally unobtrusive and leaves the stage free to Golabek to tell a fascinating story. Its message is one of music as an instrument of survival. I was only shocked to learn that Myra Hess’s fabled wartime National Gallery concerts, which I’d always assumed to be democratically available, were hot-ticket affairs dominated by tenacious, middle-class music lovers.
- At St James theatre, London, until 27 February. Buy tickets at the Guardian Box Office, or call 0330 333 6906.
