Play explores evacuation memories

Jun 6 2008 by Rebecca Edwards, Flintshire Chronicle

A COMMUNITY arts project has uncovered the hidden stories of a generation of displaced children.

We’ll Keep a Welcome, written by local playwright Mike Stevens for the newly formed Suitcase Theatre company, explores the stories of former evacuees who were moved from Liverpool to North East Wales during the war.

It sprung from a reminiscence project by Age Concern last year in which dozens of former evacuees – now in their seventies – were recorded talking about their memories.

Mike was inspired by the recorded interviews to write the play, and a photographic exhibition of portraits taken by Yale College students will run alongside it at Clwyd Theatr Cymru next week.

Of the play he said: “It is not trying to dramatise the stories, as much as represent the experience of being separated from mum and dad, being put on the train, not knowing where you are going and going to what was really a foreign country.

“A large number of children were put with familes where the first language was Welsh. One girl looked out of the window and said ‘I think we are in Austria... she had seen the station sign for Oswestry.’

“Another man said he had never seen a cow before except on a plate – the countryside and mountains made a tremendous impression on the children.”

He added: “The play is really about the relationship between parents and children and how three children react in different ways to losing their parents and sometimes finding new ones.

“They say that when two evacuees meet the first question they ask is ‘Were you lucky?’ – some children wanted to go back, some ran away and some adopted the country as their own.

“One of my interviews was with a man who really settled in to his evacuee family and when his mother saw where he was living his whole family relocated.

He still lives in Wales and sings in Rhos Male Voice Choir – you can’t get more Welsh than that!”

We’ll Keep A Welcome, written by Michael Stevens, and directed by Robert Fox, premièred at the Wrexham Arts Festival 2008 and now moves to the Emlyn Williams Theatre, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold on Thursday, Friday and Saturday June 12-14.

The accompanying photographic exhibition We’ll Keep a Welcome: Refugees and Migrants and Wales runs until June 14.

Call 0845 3303565 or see www.clwyd-theatre-cymru.com for tickets.