THE THEATRE
Watch on the Rhine." At the Aldwych Theatre.
ou are living rich, happy, and self-satisfied in a large house near ashington, D.C. (but it might be London or Guildford or Chelten- am) ; your daughter, nearly fifteen years ago, married a German ngineer, and since then you have not seen her. She comes home, ith her husband and three children, and it is revealed that they e refugees—not passive, broken refugees, but active, hunted people, 'anted by the Gestapo for the husband's underground activities ainst the Nazi regime. The husband has to return to Germany to try to rescue his comrades; who have been betrayed and captured ; but a guest in your house—a Rumanian count—finds out his secret, tries blackmail and is murdered. The husband departs, bound for a Germany from which it is almost certain he will never return. That is what happens to you in your comfortable home in Washing- on (or London or Guildford or Cheltenham).
And that is the story of Miss Lillian Hellman's play. It could be treated as a thriller, or as a politico-propagandist tract ; it is in many ways that sort of story. But Miss Hellman has chosen it as the framework for the expression of the European tragedy and of the hidden sense of guilt which those who were too much outside a will never lose ; and because she is a dramatist of the first order she has made of it the richest and most moving play we have seen since Thunder Rock.
She spares us nothing of the raw European horror of the Thirties. The man, hunted, injured from past tortures, brave as a lion because he is the victim of a terrible fear ; the wife, immensely strong in the knowledge of her fate and her faith ; the children, so terrifying in their frank and adult wisdom, and their acceptance of the fugi- tive's lot, but so roundly and truly children—these make up a group, a family whose bonds are not merely those of flesh and blood but of an implicit, never-spoken-of, and perpetual act of faith. Over against them is placed the world-adventurer—not the direct Nazi, but the assiduous jackal, the Nazi type without the Nazi faith —Nazi enough, however, to remind us, when his wife publicly exposes and deserts him, of a certain Ribbentrop who never forgave the insults he imagined he received at the Court of St. James. The second contrast is, of course, the chatelaine of the country house, growing to a graceful old age, having built for herself a character which combines eccentricity with selfishness, and masks only too often a heart of gold behind a failure to understand.
Apart from a slightly machine-made opening to the first act, the author manipulates her plot and characters with ap assurance, an economy, and a sense of human values to which only an excep- tionally talented cast could do justice. Fortunately such a cast has been assembled. To choose Athene Seyler as the old lady was almost a necessity ; and she has never acted better since The Coming of Gabrielle. Charles Goldner as the Rumanian blackmailer, and Judy Campbell, as his wife, show immense skill in making the most of their parts without—as would have been so easy—overplaying them. The children are splendid, especially Yvan Deley as Bodo, who is the baby of the family—a fact which, because of his old man's talk, they all so often forget. Of the acting of Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard as the hunted husband and wife it seems almost impertinent to speak, so deeply moving are their performances, both in voice and gesture.
The author owes also a debt of gratitude to Emlyn Williams, whose production adds much to the visual values of the play by a sense of dramatic grouping and a great economy of stage move- ment ; the silent tableau as the curtain rises on the last act is in itself like the overture to a tragic opera—one in whose plot we all are guilty participants. For is not Miss Hellman's final message just that—a reminder to us that we are all guilty, and that if it is now too late to undo what has been done, it is by no means too late to re-make, to create again a world in which decent humanity
may live, unpursued and undevoured? BASIL WRIGHT.
Previous page
