A large red shipping container stands centre stage. As the house lights go down we hear a voice singing from inside it and Ben Caplan’s head, with huge bushy beard and waves of shaggy hair under a purple top hat, appears through the top. Then the container opens to reveal four seated musicians playing a klezmer tune, amidst a cacophony of bits and bobs – clothes, samovar, suitcases, stools and carnival-like strings of lights.

Ben Caplan in Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. Photograph © Prudence Upton

Caplan, a renowned Canadian folk musician, is The Wanderer, a kind of eccentric emcee who acts as the frontman and narrator of Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story – a man with a growling, mischievous, robust presence, who stands for much of the performance on a platform to the right of the shipping container, chatting directly to the audience and driving the show. The production moves between songs and patter by Caplan, to dialogue scenes in which two of the musicians – woodwind player Dani Oore and violinist Mary Fay Coady – play two Romanian Jews, Chaim and Chaya. (The other two musicians are Graham Scott on...