Hellman was both wit and political visionary – not necessarily exclusive categories, but in her case uncomfortably manacled to each other. It is, though, a play strangely at odds with itself. Ellen McDougall’s handsome, convinced production speaks to today’s fear of the rise of dictatorship and new fissures between east and west. It is shrewd of the Donmar (wake up, Arts Council, which took the theatre’s grant away, while diminishing the Almeida’s funding) to revive Lillian Hellman’s play now. In 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the second world war, Watch on the Rhine – a demand that America take action against fascism – was produced. It is noise that finally overcomes Blanche: in a wonderful touch, the people who take her off to the asylum are the musicians: chords, not cords, will bind her. Music and sound – from a band and singer above the action – are essential here: crooning, humming, whistling, the clash of cymbals, the thump of drums, an inchoate clamour a mix of inner and outer chaos. Not only in balletic episodes (she sometimes overdoes the bending of limbs) but in the choreographing that groups and scatters the cast to a distinctive rhythm. She seems propelled by the velocity of her words, her own laughter so forced and hard that you can almost see it hanging in the air.įrecknall’s training as a dancer infuses her production. Meanwhile the marvellous Ferran, younger than usual for the woman depending on the kindness of strangers, brings a particular wit to Blanche: she fuses innocence and snobbery, and raises an uneasy laugh with her fastidious reference to Edgar Allan Poe as she rolls her eyes at her sister’s arrangements. ‘Arresting’: Anjana Vasan, right, as Stella with Paul Mescal.
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