The here-for-goods, the go-betweens and the left-behinds

Grażyna Antkiewicz emigrates to Scotland to make enough money to send her daughter Ewa to college. Her and her family’s subsequent struggles are interspersed with the tale of the death of Robert Dziekanski, who died at Toronto airport attempting to visit his mother. Featuring two Traverse Theatre Company actors and two actors from the Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz, Cherry Blossom is an incredibly inventive piece that combines written, devised and verbatim accounts of the distance between the dreams and realities of those who choose to leave their own country and put down roots in another.

It is also a play that wittily deals with the importance of language: the dialogue is split between English and Polish, often in the same conversation, although the script has been printed entirely in English to allow for post-performance gap-filling. Grażyna arrives in Edinburgh, unable to communicate with employment officers, co-workers and her landlord. Gradually and painstakingly throughout the drama she learns enough to be able to satisfy her needs and wants. Meanwhile, in Poland, her husband struggles with housekeeping, and her son Jasiek, stranded without his mother, becomes more and more resentful, introverted and withdrawn.

The cast swap between characters, producing some funny and touching scenes in which the two men play female characters and vice versa. The overall impression is fluid and transitory, reflecting the rootless nature of the characters. But, while the extent to which a two-sided conversation may be understood when experienced from one side only is surprising indeed, it remains rather easy for non-bilingual audience members to become distracted during all-Polish passages, which proves detrimental to the action as a whole.

The set consists of movable boards onto which the outlines and photographic images of scene locations, as well as some translated text, are projected. While impressive and often beautiful, their use appears, at times, random. Featured in some scenes and not others, with outlines of the insides of houses or flats proving irrelevant to the movement of the actors, they do however compliment the episodic nature of the performance. Cherry Blossom is by no means perfect, but it succeeds in being thought-provoking and captivating, which is just as good.