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.
