Denise Black, known for her roles in TV soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale, is to appear in Nottingham Playhouse’s production of Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport.
She will play Lil, an ordinary Manchester mum who has taken in a young Jewish girl Eva (Jenny Walser).
Earlier in 2018, Black took the role of the mother in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal at the Almeida Theatre. In 2017, she was Rainey in Gary Owen’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff.
Patrick Osborne will take on multiple roles including the ratcatcher, a Nazi border controller and a postman. He played Frank Lubey in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Nottingham Playhouse in 2017. Nottingham actress Rebecca D’Souza is Eva’s mother Helga.
Kindertransport examines the story of thousands of Jewish child refugees who were sent by their parents to England to escape Nazi persecution before the outbreak of World War II.
Fast forward to 1980s England and Eva is now in her fifties and goes by a different name, Evelyn (played by Cate Hamer). As she prepares for her only daughter Faith (Elena Breschi, making her professional debut) to leave home, memories are unearthed among boxes in the attic and questions must be answered about a life buried a long time ago.
Kindertransport runs at Nottingham Playhouse from Friday 5 until Saturday 20 October.