YOUNG actors are often given minor parts or used in plays to add comic value, but Kayleigh Lunt brings drama, humour, sadness and intelligence to the extremely difficult lead role in Bolton Little Theatre's production of Diane Samuels' Kindertransport.

Eva, an 11-year-old German Jewish girl is put on a train to England at the beginning of the Second World War, leaving behind her family and friends for a strange country where she will eventually opt to stay after hostilities have ended, despite pressure from her natural mother to return.

Kindertransport documents her separation from her parents, her adoption by an English family and the effects her secret past life have on generations to come.

This is a play that explores polar opposites; there is warmth and coldness, love and hate, joy and despair, togetherness and separation and, with all that, a family attempting to come to terms with a newly discovered past.

Kayleigh Lunt's performance as Eva, who changes her name to Evelyn on making the decision to remain in Manchester after the war, is quite simply breathtaking. She grasps the mood of each scene and tackles it with the confidence of an actor who has taken on such a role many times before.

Carol Butler is excellent as the older Evelyn, a tortured woman struggling to come to terms with her life, yet determined to press on with her future.

Helen Price Aindow, as Evelyn's kept-in-the-dark daughter Faith, is suitably enraged. At times warm towards her mother, yet maintaining the distance that making such a dark discovery must create.

Credit must also go to Rita Mayoh as Evelyn's German mother Helga and Nina Faulkner as her adopted mother Lil.

Steve Gill shows adaptability, taking on no fewer than five smaller parts, and Audrey and Jim Lias's direction makes sure the tension never lets up.

At the end of the show there is barely a dry eye in the house, and it's not often you can say that and really mean it.

Kindertransport, Bolton Little Theatre, until Saturday March 31