In Lillian Hellman’s 1941 melodrama, the war in Europe bursts through the genteel, neutral country-house door of Washington dowager Fanny (Patricia Hodge), and she is forced to pick a side. The message – that you can’t equivocate over or ignore fascism, however distantly it flowers – chimes with our times. Ellen McDougall’s production is crisp and movingly acted, but I’ve no idea why the Donmar revived something so old-fashioned.
Hellman is best known for her plays The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes, as well as for her early Hollywood screenplays and later memoirs; for defying McCarthyism and for dying midway through the libel lawsuit she brought against novelist Mary McCarthy, who alleged she was a liar. Watch on the Rhine, which was made into a film starring Bette Davis in 1943 (now hard to find), falls into the category of the justly neglected within her oeuvre.
The stage version starts out as a tougher, wise-cracking, American riff on a 1930s drawing room comedy, a la Coward or Rattigan. Hodge’s formidably awful Fanny verbally duels with the servants and all but emasculates her son David (a tremulous Geoffrey Streatfeild) with every withering aside.
Then prodigal daughter Sara arrives with her German husband Kurt Muller and their three children, starving refugees from the long underground fight against Hitler and Franco. There’s comic, wide-eyed prattle about the opulence of American breakfasts and plumbing from these adorable poppets. The scarred Kurt is played with immense grace and dignity by German actor Mark Waschke, Sara with watchful resolve by Caitlin FitzGerald.
The Mullers almost relax into the family bosom, even if the atmosphere is as snappy as it is potentially happy. But, oh no! Skint Romanian count Teck de Brancovis (John Light, face set in a Dominic Raab grimace) is also a houseguest. Searingly aware of his poverty and his imminent cuckolding by the drippy David, he’s happy to play the Mullers off against his Nazi diplomat friends for cash.
The play moves from arch comedy to impassioned rhetoric to a shocking act of violence, before concluding on a note of outright sentiment. Embracing his family, Kurt notes that in every conflict, however brutal or bitter, there must be “someone who loves children, who wants a better world for them”. Yep. Okay. Little bit sick in my mouth there.
The performances are solid and stirring. Basia BiÅkowska’s set confines the cast for too long behind a frame that recalls a 1950s TV screen, before letting them downstage. But I liked little stylistic touches in her design, such as the thriftily mismatched buttons on Sara’s cardigan.
Overall, this is a handsomely mounted, well-acted work that strums reliably on the emotions, but feels inescapably like a museum piece. Scratchy film at the end tells us about the real Jewish-American-German couple that inspired Watch on the Rhine, and Hellman’s own later steadfastness during the McCarthy witchhunts in the 1950s. A new play about either might feel more stimulating.
Donmar Warehouse, to February 4; donmarwarehouse.com
