Watch On The Rhine
Donmar Warehouse | ★★★✩✩
It helps to know some background before seeing this revival of Lillian Hellman’s call-to-arms play of 1941. Firstly, she de-Jewed the work’s hero and one of its heroines, so potent was American antisemitism at the time of its premiere.
The action in this political thriller is set in the 1940 living room of a wealthy widow’s country house in Washington DC. Central non-Jewish characters Kurt Muller (played here by the German actor Mark Waschke) and the house’s formidable owner Fanny Farrelly (Patricia Hodge) were both inspired by real Jews, in Muller’s case by the Jewish communist spy Otto Katz, whom Hellman met.
It also helps to know that the playwright, most famous for The Little Foxes, was a communist (though she denied it) and that in the wake of her play she was reprimanded by comrades for attacking Nazis who had a pact with the Soviet Union before Germany attacked in 1941.
Also that after the war she was one of the writers blacklisted by America’s anti-communist purge. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” she told the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Patricia Hodge in WATCH ON THE RHINE - Donmar Warehouse - photo by Manuel Harlan
Patricia Hodge in Watch on the Rhine (Manuel Harlan)
All this contextualises and in some respects excuses what is ultimately a blunt if rousing piece of agitprop. All the scenes take place in a drawing room of a rich household that is staffed by servants.
The boss is ferocious Fanny (Hodge), who suffers no fools and lives with her meek lawyer son David (Geoffrey Streatfeild). Also staying is the visiting Marthe (Carlyss Peer), a high-society friend of the family now married to Teck, a Romanian aristocratic cad (John Light).
Mother and son are on tenterhooks because for the first time in decades Fanny’s daughter Sara is returning to her childhood home from Europe with her three children and husband Kurt, who we quickly learn is an anti-fascist activist.
The play opened in New York when Roosevelt’s America was turning back Jewish refugees and the idea of America joining the war in Europe was considered by many to be a Jewish “special interest” cause at odds with America’s national interest.
Hellman’s objective was to put the case for intervention and to that end she turned her hero from a Jew to Kurt Muller, a German anti-Nazi freedom fighter who fought fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He was not only a fiction but the kind of chap who probably never existed.
Although the facts of Muller’s life are unconvincing, Waschke is terrific as a wounded and weary civilised man who has been brutalised by his enemy. However, the plot device that sees him plan a return to Germany to spring his fellow activists from a Nazi jail by bribing guards is just too far- fetched for disbelief to be suspended any further.
John Light and Carlyss Peer in WATCH ON THE RHINE - Donmar Warehouse - photo by Manuel Harlan
John Light and Carlyss Peer in Watch on the Rhine (Manuel Harlan)
Ellen McDougall’s elegant production acknowledges the Bette Davis film version of the play by bookending the production with scratchy black and white cinematic projections. None of this quite justifies the revival on its own. Yet with a little context the evening is a fascinating one.
What emerges is the distance between relatively comfortable America and a Europe in turmoil (plus ça change) where a mortal battle rages.
By the evening’s end that conflict has spilt blood on the Farrelly carpet. Recommended.
