Six roles, five actors, three generations
Characters
The cast list is itself a piece of meaning: one actor plays every threatening stranger, and the play’s central character needs two actors to be shown at all. Know what each character is for, not just what they do.
Evelyn
An English middle-class woman in her fifties, and the finished product of the play’s central transaction: safety purchased with a self. Evelyn is characterised through behaviour before speech, the obsessive polishing, the tidying, the horror of dust and mess, ritual suppressions that tell the audience what she will not. Her language is control: clipped, ironic, deflecting. Her flat claim that her memory of that time ‘is blank’ is contradicted by the entire set around her, which is her memory, boxed and stacked. Whether tearing the letters is villainy, survival or symptom is one of the best evaluative questions the play offers; the strongest essays let it stay difficult.
Key quotations: ‘…my memory of that time. It honestly is blank.’ · ‘You must forget it.’ · ‘I certainly have.’
Eva
Evelyn’s younger self, aged nine to seventeen across the play, a German Jewish child becoming, line by line, an English one. Eva is the play’s battleground: every scene she is in stages a tug-of-war over who she will be, waged in languages (‘Ich bin Deutsche!’), birthdays, labels and names. Crucially, Samuels has Eva and Evelyn played by different actors who share the stage: the self split so completely that one body cannot hold both. Eva’s guilt, the failed permits, ‘Nichts. Nothing.’, is the wound underneath Evelyn’s whole adult architecture.
Key quotations: ‘Ich muss es tragen. Ich hasse es.’ · ‘I’m called Evelyn now.’ · ‘I never wanted to live without you and you made me!’
Helga
Eva’s mother: a German Jewish woman in her early thirties in 1938, and the play’s hardest lesson in reading love correctly. Everything that looks like coldness in Scene One, the sewing drill, the strictness, the packed case, is preparation: a mother arming her child for a world without her. Her creed, ‘Through our children we live’, is answered with the play’s cruellest irony when the child she saved will not be hers. Post-war Helga, ‘thin, wizened, old looking’, carries history onto the stage in her body. Avoid the trap of judging her twice, too harsh in Act One, too demanding in Act Two; the play asks instead what her choices cost her each time.
Key quotations: ‘You are my children… you are my jewels’ · ‘Through our children we live. That’s how we cheat death.’ · ‘I wish you had lived.’
Lil
Eva’s foster mother, in her eighties in the present scenes: warm, practical, Mancunian, and the play’s study in well-meaning complicity. Lil rescues Eva and loves her without reserve; Lil also presides over the anglicising that unmakes Eva Schlesinger, and her flash of temper (‘You little snake!’) shows the limits of her patience with a grief she cannot understand. In the present she is keeper of both women’s secrets, and her metaphors (‘locking the safe after the robber’s been and gone’) cut closer to truth than anything Evelyn allows herself. Her claim, ‘I saved you’, is true, and the play spends its whole length weighing what the saving cost.
Key quotations: ‘I saved you.’ · ‘You little snake!’ · ‘Why should she hate you? She’s your daughter.’
Faith
Evelyn’s only child, in her early twenties, and the audience’s representative on stage: she discovers the past at our pace, reading the letters as we watch their story. Faith is the play’s evidence that trauma is hereditary even when hidden, especially when hidden: she has spent her life decoding her mother’s unexplained anxieties and blaming herself for them. Her anger drives the present-day plot, and the ending hands her the play’s future: the first member of the family to hold the whole truth. What she does with it happens after the curtain, which is precisely the point.
Key quotations: ‘Mum, tell me about Eva Schlesinger.’ · ‘Why make a secret out of it?’ · ‘I’ve always thought it was my fault.’
The Ratcatcher
‘A mythical character’ from the Pied Piper storybook, and the play’s theatrical masterstroke: the same actor plays the Nazi Border Official, the English Organiser, the Postman and the Station Guard, every male stranger with power over Eva, in Germany and in England alike. He never interacts with the other characters as himself; he is music, shadow, and the shiver under ordinary scenes. Read him as the shape of what is feared and suppressed: for Eva, abandonment and pursuit; for Evelyn, the buried lie. The insight from the play’s original rehearsals is worth an essay sentence: the more a character suppresses, the stronger the Ratcatcher becomes. Any paragraph on him is automatically an AO2 paragraph, if you analyse the doubling and not just the symbol.
Key quotations: ‘He’s waiting in the shadows.’ / ‘There’s no one there.’
Writing about characters in coursework
Character questions here are drama questions. For any character, ask: how are they established physically (costume, props, behaviour) before their words? What does their register of speech do (Helga’s imperatives, Lil’s colloquialisms, Evelyn’s deflections)? How does the doubling or non-doubling frame them? And how does the audience’s judgement of them change, because the play is built to revise our first readings, of Helga above all.