After the New York Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, New York Center for Jewish History, Avram Goldfaden International Jewish theater festival in Iasi, Romania, and the successful Pentameters Theatre run in London

The Scotsman Review


THERE’S no denying the impact of this (true) story of young Jewish Pole Ester’s survival of Auschwitz and Berger-Belsen. The audience rose and applauded as one at the curtain. 

Erene Kaptani, as present-day Ester, sits in an armchair, grimly relating woeful episodes, while the very fine Emma Paterson scurries about, wringing her hands, as "young Ester", through a veil of tears. Hers is a performance of grip and conviction. 

Ester is barely 14 when the horrors of Krakow break out, and her tale of atrocity and loss is punctuated only infrequently by shafts of light - a half loaf of bread here, a transfer to a less horrific factory there. With some devastating if underused photography and footage, this is a saga of pogroms, labour and death camps, endless train journeys, beating, starvation and disease. 

Writer Miri Ben-Shalom’s script needs an experienced radio producer’s hand to chop, tighten and eradicate repetition, as well as free the poetry crying to get out. That would earn it another star.