The Parting

What happens

The Ratcatcher’s music opens the play. We are in an attic storage room in present-day suburban London, and also, impossibly, in Hamburg in 1938: Helga is teaching her nine-year-old daughter Eva to sew a button, because soon there will be no mother nearby to sew for her. Around them, in the present, Evelyn tidies obsessively and her adult daughter Faith unpacks boxes; at one point the stage direction offers the play’s only deliberate ambiguity, if Evelyn sees Helga and Eva, she ignores them.

Helga packs Eva’s case while Faith, in the same space, unpacks dolls; a toy train quietly foreshadows the journey. Helga hides jewellery in Eva’s shoes and tells her she is one of her ‘jewels’. Faith in the present and Helga in the past read the same story aloud, the Ratcatcher of Hamelin, as Eva puts on her coat and the label numbered 3362. At the station Eva calls out to parents who are no longer there. On the train, a Nazi Border Official searches her, finds the hidden jewellery, then offers her a toffee and ruffles her hair. Then the border: ‘It’s the border! Yes! We’re out!’

A closer look

One room, two worlds

Samuels’ central formal decision is visible within minutes: the past is not reported, remembered or dissolved into flashback, it shares the stage with the present. The attic, a room where families store what they cannot throw away, is the perfect physical metaphor for Evelyn’s mind. Watch how the two time-frames brush against each other: Eva reaches for something right by Faith’s feet; Helga packs while Faith unpacks. For coursework purposes this is form creating meaning: the staging argues, before anyone says it, that the past is materially present in Evelyn’s house and in her daughter’s life.

Mothering as preparation for loss

The button-sewing that opens the play looks like an ordinary lesson and is in fact a terrible one: Helga is preparing her child to live without her. Everything Helga does in this scene, the strictness, the packed case, the hidden jewellery, the insistence that Eva learn practical skills, is love expressed as survival planning. The ‘jewels’ hidden in the shoes literalise her later line that children are how parents ‘cheat death’. Audiences often find Helga cold here; the play wants that first misreading, so it can spend two acts correcting it.

The Ratcatcher arrives

The Pied Piper story, read aloud as Eva dresses for the transport, gives the play its presiding figure: the Ratcatcher who leads children away from their parents. Note what Samuels does with him theatrically: he is played by the same actor as the Border Official, and later the Organiser, the Postman and the Station Guard, every adult male stranger with power over Eva. The Border Official scene shows why the doubling matters: menace and false kindness in one body, a toffee offered by the hand that has just confiscated her mother’s jewellery. Fear, in this play, keeps changing costume.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘What’s an abyss, Mutti?’	Child’s question, motif	The play’s central image of separation and loss, planted in innocence; track the abyss across the play.
‘You are my children… you are my jewels’	Metaphor, symbolism	Children as treasure to be hidden and preserved; the literal jewellery makes the metaphor physical.
‘If she sees HELGA and EVA… she ignores them.’	Ambivalent stage direction	The play’s only deliberately open direction: how visible is the past to Evelyn? Every production must decide.
‘The border! It’s the border! Yes! We’re out!’	Exclamative, dramatic irony	Escape voiced as joy while the audience holds what Eva cannot: what she is leaving, and what comes for those who stayed.