This week saw the opening previews of Lilian Hellman's The Children's Hour at the Comedy Theatre. I've got a vested interest in this as I'm going to see it in a few weeks. Here's the review from The Telegraph;
"They came to see two of Hollywood's brightest stars. They left raving about a virtual unknown from Hampshire.
When posters were plastered all over London's West End announcing the play The Children's Hour, few doubted that all eyes would be on the English-born, Oscar-nominated Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss, world famous for her role as Peggy Olson in the television hit Mad Men. Judging by The Sunday Telegraph's canvassing of the audience at a preview performance of the play, however, it may be a former barmaid who steals the show on opening night this Wednesday."
"Take a bow Bryony Hannah, 26, who little more than five years ago was pulling pints in the Hampshire Bowman, Dundridge. (At about the same time that Knightley was being Oscar nominated for her role in Pride & Prejudice.) The verdict of last week's preview audience at the Comedy Theatre suggested it may be her performance that the critics notice, not Knightley or Moss's."
Michael Billington in the Guardian had this to say;
"There's only one question to which everyone wants the answer: can Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss cut the mustard? The short answer is that they prove as potent a combination on stage as at the box office. But, for all the excellence of their performances, and Ian Rickson's ministrations as director, nothing will persuade me that Lillian Hellman's 1934 play is any more than well-intentioned melodrama.
At first glance, it seems her subject is false accusation of the kind Arthur Miller was to develop more fully in The Crucible. Karen and Martha, long-time friends who've set up a school on a Massachusetts farm, find themselves charged by a vengeful pupil, Mary, of being secret lovers. But it takes a long first act to set up the situation and one is astonished at the ease with which Mary is believed. It doesn't help that Bryony Hannah plays her as a restless psychopath whom you wouldn't trust to give the time of day: one wishes her evil intent sprang from a chilling quietude instead of being frantically signalled.
Hellman's play acquires dramatic momentum in the second half: she writes well on the corrupting effect of false witness, and there is a particularly poignant scene between Karen and her fiance, Joe, in which every word they utter seems contaminated. But, having set up a play about a society which punishes the innocent, Hellman changes tack and writes a play about moral and sexual guilt. I won't spoil the ending for future customers, but you have to trust me that the play comes to an improbably melodramatic conclusion.
Rickson does his level best to overcome the deficiencies in the text. He virtually rewrites the opening scene to suggest the school is filled with incipient sexual hysteria, and even has the girls rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra rather than The Merchant of Venice as in the original. He also shrewdly lays the psychological ground for the conclusion.
Elisabeth Moss, captivating as Peggy in Mad Men, firmly establishes Martha as the dominant partner. Her body arches with tension when she realises her annual holiday with Karen will be shared with Joe, and there is a great moment when, left alone, she stares at a table in rueful stillness. Moss's achievement, in fact, is to combine the everyday busyness of a working teacher with subtle hints she has a suppressed longing that transcends mere friendship. In an outstanding performance, she lends Martha a dark secretiveness which goes some way to prepare us for the violent turnaround of Hellman's climax.
Keira Knightley has the equally challenging task of making Karen more than the cipher she first appears. But she is excellent in her climactic encounter with her fiance, well played by Tobias Menzies, when her lean, elegant frame suddenly seems rigid with physical anguish. And, when she claims "everything I say to you is made to mean something else", Knightley radiates a lonely despair.
In fact, the acting throughout is a source of pleasure. Carol Kane turns Martha's aunt, a onetime thesp turned teacher, into a whimsically batty version of Miss Jean Brodie, and Ellen Burstyn as the evil Mary's doting grandmother almost manages to persuade us that she would have swallowed a tissue of lies.
Everything possible, including Mark Thompson's blue clapboard schoolroom set, is done to make the play work. But nothing can disguise the fact this is a flawed piece, in which Hellman can't decide whether she is writing about the corrosiveness of false accusation or the power of buried sexual passion."
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