Review: LIFEBOAT, Jack Studio Theatre

My mother's homes were bombed three times in the Luftwaffe's raids on Liverpool; my father was evacuated to rural Cheshire. Other children from Liverpool (and elsewhere in the UK) were sent to more far-flung destinations by The Children's Overseas Reception Board. Two of those evacuees, giddy with excitement at the prospect of such an adventure, were Bess Walder and Beth Cummings. They survived - many did not - when their ship, the SS City of Benares, was torpedoed en route to Canada. Lifeboat is their story.

We meet the pair clinging to the capsized lifeboat of the title, desperate, but with the spirit that is always a cliché, but always heartwarming, egging each other on to get through it, expecting, hoping, willing the rescuers to arrive. It's how you would hope you would behave - but you doubt that you'd summon the fortitude for it. These kids had the right stuff.

We topple back in time to discover more about the girls. Bess is posh, a Londoner and a dreamer, her heart set on Hollywood stardom after she's explored the wide open spaces she sees in the Canadian Tourist Board brochures she collects. Beth is a down to earth Scouser - the lesson she takes from The Wizard of Oz is not Bess's ambition to follow the Yellow Brick Road to become the next Judy, but that there's no place like home.

For all that, the two get along well, playing the deck games run by chaperones, enjoying the cruise liner quality food provided by stewards and, as teens will, gigglingly eyeing a man in a uniform. It's touching to be told in the epilogue that they remained friends well into their 70s - good things happening to good people.

Claire Bowman and Lindsey Scott do a fine job in bringing our two brave girls to life - and plenty more family members and crew with a pair of glasses and a coat or two as props. Indeed, you have to remind yourself at the curtain that we've been watching women and not children.

Nicola McCartney's script just about avoids overstaying its welcome - all through in 70 minutes, crisply directed by Kate Bannister on a beautiful set by Karl Swinyard. The structural issue is that we know the girls get through it and that their lives, while clearly standing as a symbol for the many ordinary kids plunged into such extraordinary jeopardy, are just a bit too ordinary really.

Nevertheless, Lifeboat is thoroughly engaging and pays a fine tribute to the victims of an appalling tragedy, one that led to an end of the practice of sending children overseas. One hopes that the play will be staged in schools to support a range of subjects within the curriculum and provide a perspective on how lucky kids, indeed all of us, are today.

Lifeboat continues at the Jack Studio Theatre until 6 October.

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