Watch on the Rhine – Donmar Warehouse, London

Writer: Lillian Hellman

Director: Ellen McDougall

A 1941 play by The Children’s Hour’s Lillian Hellman may seem an odd choice by the Donmar for its new show. Watch on the Rhine is a slow thriller, bringing the Second War World into the lives of one wealthy Washington family before America was forced to join in the fighting. The Donmar’s production is well-acted and stylishly designed but the era’s complex politics are made too simple.

Patricia Hodge is in fine form as the abrasive matriarch Fanny Farrelly. Her husband is dead, but there is the sense that she has always been in control of the mansion on the outskirts of Washington, from what time breakfast is served to the way she talks to her African-American servant. But the imminent arrival of her daughter after 20 years away in Europe has put her on edge. Daughter Sara has come by train with her German husband and her three earnest children.

Fanny’s house, marvellously designed in greys and grey-greens by Basia Bińkowska, is already busy. There’s her retainer Anise, her unmarried lawyer son David and the American Marthe and her Romanian husband Teck, who have fled Europe and remain penniless as refugees in Fanny’s home. David is initially a little wet, but when we discover that he is engaging in an affair with Marthe, right under her husband’s nose, his character is a little more interesting. Geoffrey Streatfeild gives David a dull power that sharpens throughout the play.

This typical drawing room play is subverted when Sara, committed yet weary in Caitlin Fitzgerald’s hands, finally arrives with her family. Their appearance with dirt on their faces and scuffs on their shoes is in stark contrast to the luxurious lives of her mother and her houseguests. Confronted once more with her family’s privileges, Sara announces that she ‘no longer knows the language of rooms like these’. Sara’s husband Kurt declares himself as an anti-fascist. Fanny tells him that they are all anti-fascist but that there are different levels. Any radical politics in either direction would have been considered deeply un-American at the time.

However, because of the anti-Semitic atmosphere in America during the early 40s Hellman’s antifascist is not Jewish, almost as if to show that the war in Europe is everyone’s problem, not just that of Jewish Europeans. In an effort to add some Jewish details to the play musical director Josh Middleton has used music by Jewish composers. It’s a nice touch, and adds background to the play but in the end the villain of the piece seems too one-dimensional.

Almost stealing the show, are the three young actors playing Sara and Kurt’s children. Joshua, Babette and Bodo have all grown up too soon and are almost adult-like in their views on the world, especially Joshua, the eldest, who knows most of what his father’s ‘job’ entails. But it is the adorable Bodo (on press night played by Bertie Caplan) who garners the most sympathy with the audience with his solemn optimism and his love of long foreign words.

With another war raging in Europe threatening to unbalance the world, perhaps Hellman’s play is ripe for revival after all. There are those who have gone to fight for Ukraine’s freedom, but Watch on the Rhine, named after a German song, brings the violence closer to home. In 1941, Hellman’s play was a wake-up call for America; now it’s a reminder of how little has changed.

Continues until 4 February 2023