Getting Here, The Guardian

Jose and Catarina, his pregnant wife, are a young Portuguese couple determined to start a new life in the east of England. 'I carry the future, not the past,' says Catarina, patting her belly. But every immigrant to a new land comes weighed down by baggage, and that baggage is the memory of the past, a need to belong, and the ties of family that mean you are living in one place while your heart is in another.

Must you ditch the past and begin completely anew? What can you take with you and what must be discarded? Those are the issues raised in this rough but engaging site-responsive piece from Eastern Angles, which draws on the experience of Portuguese, Polish and African-Caribbean communities who have settled in the region. The production is a promenade, keeping its audiences on the move just like its characters, who also include a young Polish girl, Malina, on her way to a new life.

If Malina doesn't really know where she is going, neither does she know where she has come from, but she is about to find out as her plane makes a metaphysical diversion. The passengers find themselves forced to confess if they have anything to declare to the pilot, the God-like Captain John who may move in mysterious ways but in actual fact hails from St Lucia. Soon the luggage is being removed from the hold, suitcases are opened, and memories spill out. Most moving is the story of the evacuation of East Prussia during the second world war, as German civilians attempted to escape the advancing Red Army by crossing the frozen Vistula lagoon.

The writing lacks crispness and the staging is sometimes a mite clumsy, but there are very nice performances in a piece that makes us all reflect on how we or our forebears got here.

3 STARS

Lyn Gardner