Watch on the Rhine (Donmar Warehouse, 22/23 production)

I have always had a weakness for this play of Lillian Hellman’s, which I first read as a student and have finally seen live in the production at the Donmar. Quite possibly it’s because it’s about an anti-fascist named Sara who married in her very early twenties and is finally returning to the family home outside Washington DC. No personal parallels there, no siree. 

Hellman’s mediocre reputation has always annoyed me. In her own time she was not well-liked, partially due to her relationship with Dashiell Hammett and perhaps a willingness to be flexible with the facts in order to improve her writings, but I think it’s a keen slander to say that Hammett authored her plays. I just don’t think a man of Hammett’s bitingly non-descriptive style could have gotten down the nuanced mothers in Hellmann’s plays. They strike me as only possible from someone who spent a girlhood eavesdropping on adults with no interest in coddling the small people in the house (no parallels there, either). I also happen to think Hellman had an unusually strong personal conscience, one that many other people do not happen to share. Her steely righteousness – which can be a bit crusading in her works, while simultaneously achieving an honesty about personal prejudices that most other writers deal with by refusing to touch – was almost certainly just as grating in her personal life. That said, I don’t know why there’s been a continued refusal to assess her work on its own merits. If we can revive Patricia Highsmith, who was famously horrendous to know, why not Hellman?

But what all this really boils down to is that “Watch on the Rhine” was a very clever choice for the Donmar to put on right now. It was first produced on Broadway before America joined the second world war, and is a clear demand for America to join the fight against fascism and Nazism, in the same way that the world needs to hear again right now. (Where are all them tanks we keep promising Ukraine?) The kids in the play are not especially great (though some of that is Hellman’s fault, for writing such irritating child characters). The men are not as distinct, personality-wise, as they ought to be, and none of the actors (with the exception of Mark Webber as Joseph) quite managed to handle the speechifying with anything resembling a fresh personality. 

But the women, most of them at least, were something else. Kate Duchêne as Anise, the bonne-a-toute-faire, made it clear that while she has worked for the family for so long she is fully part of it, she also has a separate, private self that all the best assistants have. Caitlin FitzGerald as Sara was the center of the action, mainly through body language, which is an underappreciated skill. But Patricia Hodge as Fanny, Sara’s elderly mother, was the absolute star of the show. She did a flawless American accent and managed to deliver the biting private sarcasm that many matriarchs use to rule the roost without a single false note. The drawing-room set got the inherited furniture right although the painted wallpaper was much too over the top (though quite forgivable for a stage set). All in all, a worthy night in the theatre, which is meant as an excellent compliment.