Themes

1 · Memory and its suppression

The play’s founding idea is that memory is not an image in the head but a physical presence in a room. The attic is memory: boxed, stacked, gathering dust, impossible to throw away. The past does not appear in flashback, it shares the stage, because for Evelyn it has never stopped happening. Against this, Evelyn wages a lifelong campaign of suppression, polishing, tidying, and finally tearing up the letters, and the play’s verdict is embodied in the Ratcatcher: what is buried does not die, it grows. Her claim that her memory of that time ‘is blank’ is disproved by the staging itself, dramatic irony built into the play’s form.

Anchor quotations: ‘I found a box of letters and photographs.’ · ‘…my memory of that time. It honestly is blank.’ · ‘You must forget it.’

Coursework angle: the Memory question quotes the idea that invisible memory is made ‘material and physical’. Your argument lives in the staging: the attic, the objects, the shared space, the destruction of the letters.

2 · Identity

Eva Schlesinger becomes Evelyn: new name, new birthday, new language, new religion, a remaking so complete that when her first mother returns there is no daughter left to collect. The play weighs what survival cost: is Evelyn a triumph of adaptation or a casualty who happens to be alive? Samuels’ casting choice argues the case theatrically: Eva and Evelyn are played by two different actors, sharing a stage, a self split so deeply it takes two bodies to show it. Track the identity markers as they fall: the label, the language, the birthday, the Star of David.

Anchor quotations: ‘I’m called Evelyn now.’ · ‘Ich bin Deutsche!’ · ‘She just wanted to make a fresh start.’

Coursework angle: identity underwrites every focus: memory (what Evelyn buried is a self), family (mothers shape and unmake identity) and conflict (the war inside one person).

3 · Mothers and children

Three mother-daughter pairs, each a different answer to the same question: what do families do to and for each other? Helga’s love is preparation, discipline, the courage to send her child away, and it reads as coldness until you understand it. Lil’s love is warmth and rescue, and it quietly finishes the erasure of Eva’s first self. Evelyn’s love for Faith is protection through concealment, and it transmits the very damage it hides. The play refuses a good-mother / bad-mother reading: every mother here saves and harms in the same gesture.

Anchor quotations: ‘You are my children… you are my jewels’ · ‘Through our children we live.’ · ‘I saved you.’ · ‘Why should she hate you? She’s your daughter.’

Coursework angle: the direct family question. Structure by mother-pair rather than by scene, and compare methods: Helga’s imperatives, Lil’s colloquial warmth, Evelyn’s silences.

4 · Generational trauma

The play’s most modern insight: trauma untold does not stay put, it moves down the family line. Faith has grown up inside her mother’s unexplained anxieties, the paranoia about dust, the hyperventilating on trains, and drawn the child’s conclusion: ‘I’ve always thought it was my fault.’ The cyclical ending, Faith discovering a hidden history as Eva once faced hers, stages the transmission structurally. The abyss Eva asked about on page three has been inherited.

Anchor quotations: ‘I’ve always thought it was my fault.’ · ‘Why make a secret out of it?’ · ‘What’s an abyss, Mutti?’

Coursework angle: the generational trauma question. Trace one symptom (secrecy, cleaning, the trains) from cause to inheritance, and use the cyclical structure as your AO2 spine.

5 · Conflict and the legacy of war

The war itself happens offstage; what Samuels stages is its long afterlife. External conflict (Nazism, the newsreel, English prejudice on the doorstep) becomes internal conflict (Eva against Evelyn, memory against suppression) becomes interpersonal conflict (Evelyn against Faith, Helga against Eva). The rejection scene and the ‘monumental / personal’ exchange are where the scales of suffering are weighed. The play’s argument: wars do not end when they end; they are re-fought in kitchens and attics for generations.

Anchor quotations: ‘My suffering is monumental. Yours is personal.’ · ‘They took everything. They took my family. They took six years.’ · ‘Same difference, love.’

Coursework angle: both conflict questions. Distinguish the kinds of conflict, then show one flowing into the next, external history becoming private wound.

6 · Separation, secrets and the abyss

The abyss, first a child’s vocabulary question, becomes the play’s image for every unbridgeable gap: between Hamburg and Manchester, mother and daughter, the self that left and the self that arrived, what happened and what can be said. Secrets are the play’s failed bridges: Evelyn’s concealment is meant to protect Faith from the abyss and instead drops her into it. Note how physical objects, the case, the label, the letters, the mouth organ Evelyn fails to recognise, sit at every edge of the gap.

Anchor quotations: ‘What’s an abyss, Mutti?’ · ‘There’s no point locking the safe after the robber’s been and gone.’

Coursework angle: the abyss is a ready-made motif tracker for any question: it lets you show development across the whole play in a single thread.