The Silver Sword

For the many people who have never heard of “The Silver Sword”, it is a delightful but very thought-provoking story, written by Ian Serraillier, about the problems faced by many Polish children left orphaned or lost and homeless after the Second World War. This was a very worthwhile play for both adults and children, reminding us of the dreadful conditions confronted by the Polish population at that time.

This is the story of Joseph Balicki, a school teacher, who was imprisoned by the Germans for failing to use the German language to teach in the village school. While imprisoned, his three children went into hiding and then, eventually, spent two or three years making their way from Warsaw to Switzerland, right across Germany, meeting up with many other refugee children, kindly locals and the military from Germany, Russia and America.

I am not quite sure whether to classify this as a junior production or an adult play with children but undoubtedly the principals in this case were the four young performers Sophie Clark (Ruth), Tegan Monroe (Bronia) and Toby Bennett (Edek), Joseph’s young family and Jamie O’Connor (Jan), a young lad who joined them on their journey. These youngsters gave excellent and realistic performances giving a good interpretation of the plight that so many had to cope with at that time. They were well supported by a good team of teenagers as refugees that they met on route. Jody Bull (Joseph) gave a convincing performance as the grieving father who was looking for his wife who had been sent to a labour camp and his three children that he feared might have been killed when his house was blown up. All the other adults in the cast played multiple roles and must be congratulated for managing so many fast changes and actually remembering which nationality they were depicting and producing appropriate accents to fit the part.

Well done Jenny for good direction and coping with the logistics of a play with 22 scenes. The same must be said for the lighting team, costume department, props and back stage crew and everyone involved in such a demanding production. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

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