THEATRE

The Suitcase

Belfast Synagogue. Oct 12-14 7.30pm £10/£8 belfastinternational festival.com

This year marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Belsen. But while the atrocities of the Holocaust begin to pass from living memory, their consequence has never muted. Such is the theme for Jane Coyle’s new play, co-produced by Spring Lane and Chatterbox Productions and staged as part of the Belfast International Festival. Coyle’s play revolves around the discovery of a suitcase following the death of a Leo Edelmann, an elderly Holocaust survivor who settled and started a family in Belfast. When his daughter and granddaughter uncover the battered case that once contained his worldly possessions, they find it marked with the name of an unfamilar woman – Galina Stein, Vienna – provoking an exploration of this Belfast family’s hidden history and its echoes in the present. Leo’s granddaughter is also called Galina. Who was this woman? Performed in Belfast Synagogue and incorporating live music, it is a family drama about hope, resilience and identity, where a painful past is brought necessarily back into the light.