The war is over and Germany is devastated. Thousands of displaced people and refugees are searching desperately for the families and loved ones. In a makeshift underground office in Lübeck three young people wait, post photographs and register their details with the steely Maria, whose own husband is missing in action. Little do they know that up above them the map is being redrawn and the victors are carving up Germany and sealing borders.
Produced by new company Goose Goose Gander in this venue under the Pleasance Grand, this is a fragmentary, fragile and promising piece of work that combines text and movement to good effect, creating an elegy for small people casually swept aside by history. At one point a list of whispered names unfolds, a litany of the missing and the dead. Glass jars are placed around the performance space, each holding a photograph. It is almost as if the past has been pickled as these people are wrenched from their former lives and simply forced to begin all over again.
For some like Maria, whose marriage was already dead before her husband went to war, the chance for the fresh start is welcome, but for Jurgen, searching for his wife and baby daughter, and Hedwig, looking for her missing brother and desperate to get home to her mother, the redrawing of the political boundaries will have terrible personal consequences. Fate, of course, turns out to be a joker as it deals its cards.
Perhaps there is not a great deal of substance here, and Catherine O'Shea's delicate script is still in need of further development. But unlike the lives of the people its depicts, this little show is full of possibilities, and makes physical the mental frustration of those trapped by history.
