"Don’t go home. The Gestapo are in your apartment. They are waiting for you. Do you have your passport?"
It was 1933 when Clare Fraenkel’s grandfather, Heinz, heard those words at a Berlin party following a night at the cinema. The warning came from a “friendly Nazi” – a paradox that Fraenkel delivers with a perfectly timed quip – and set in motion a life lived in exile. He boarded the night train to Paris wearing only the clothes he stood in, never to return to Germany as a native. He is stateless, no longer the citizen of any country, all at the whim of a government.
Fast-forward to post-Brexit Britain. Clare, a Londoner, discovers that under Article 116(2) of the German Basic Law she can reclaim the citizenship stripped from Heinz by the Nazis. But is it hers to take, when Heinz himself chose to reject it? That question lies at the heart of this solo performance weaving personal discovery with a vivid portrait of a restless, resourceful refugee as she recreates that fateful night.
Directed by Lowri James and produced in collaboration with Shadowboxer Theatre, the staging is elegant and strikingly visual: suitcases become props, projections conjure silent-film Berlin, and shadow puppetry offers moments of surprising lyricism. Arran Glass’s music and sound design are subtle yet precise, underscoring shifts from Weimar cabaret to wartime Britain with deft economy. Moments of audience participation, designed to draw us into her personal and political questioning, feel slightly at odds with the overall style.
Fraenkel’s script is strongest when it balances fact with flair. We hear of Heinz’s internment without trial as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, something overturned at the behest of the British public as “just not cricket”. She recounts his failed attempt to fight in the Spanish Civil War, his encounters with everyone from Soviet soldiers in divided Berlin to Winston Churchill’s government, and his later decision, despite his exile’s homesickness, to remain in Britain for its tolerance – a virtue the play quietly asks us to re-examine today. It’s a confident and engaging performance as she shifts between narrator, family archivist, Heinz, and as a wry impersonator of moustached officials.
Although the play sometimes leans more on historical detail than dramatic tension, it is absorbing, humane, and gently provocative. It examines righting a wrong that led to her very existence and goes beyond a Brexit-era memoir to be a reminder that the tides of displacement and belonging lap constantly at our shores. Fraenkel folds past and present neatly together, setting historical fact against contemporary reality. The parallels are not hard to see – from Russian land grabs and fake news to Hitler’s initial claim of victory ‘by a lot’ despite having lost.
A thoughtful, often playful generational reflection on identity, exile, the complicated inheritance of belonging and, above all, tolerance.
Show Times: 1 to 24 (not 12) August 2025 at 1.50pm.
Tickets: £9, £12.50 (£11.50) to £14 (£13).
Suitability: 12+ (Note - Show contains strong language, loud noises, references to antisemitism and antisemitic language).