This is a superb production of a magnificent play.
First written and produced in 1934, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour still has the power to thrill an audience.
Karen and Martha run a boarding school for girls. A disgruntled student makes accusations regarding the nature of the relationship between the two teachers.
The play is a masterclass in construction, powerfully building tension and suspense. (I’m not the first person to suggest Arthur Miller must have been a student at Hellman’s feet.)
And Kim Hardwick, the director of this production, handles the material brilliantly. Her entire cast is splendid. Jess Bell’s Martha is excellent, tough and purposeful, fraught and vulnerable, understanding the dangers more clearly than she understands herself. Romney Hamilton dazzles as Karen, displaying an extraordinary range, contented confidence giving way to dismayed fear, genuine warmth striving with helpless resignation. The presentation of the women’s relationship is gloriously honest, beautiful in its unaffected vision of two individuals sharing the walk through time, invigoratingly ambiguous in its prolonged refusal to reduce to any moral pigeonhole.
Mike Booth, as Karen’s fiancé, delivers a terrific portrait of intelligent, good-hearted determination doing its best to brush off the ubiquitous spider webs of rumour and doubt. Deborah Jones’ Aunt Lily, a down-on-her-luck thespian, creates hilarity through her self-importance, and deep poignancy through the heartbreaking imbalance between her insight and her courage. Kim Clifton as Mary Tilford, the accusing student, gives an utterly mesmerising portrait of manipulation and self-interest. Sarah Ballantyne as Rosalie, one of the students who suffers from Mary’s bullying, movingly portrays the descent from resistance to terror. Annie Byron as Mary’s grandmother effectively combines dignified concern with its bastard half-sister, self-righteousness.
Disrupting heteronormative assumptions, the play met both praise and derision on its first outings. One of the charms of this current production is that it evokes so strongly the theatrical (and filmic) style of the mid-thirties. This is achieved through performance choices, but also through set design by Emelia Simcox and costume design by Hannah Yardley. A translucent backdrop, painted scenery – a supposedly static world we know to be a façade, one that hides competing visions, and one that facilitates the pretence of the privileged to Truth.
On the simplest level, contemporary audiences will read the play as a passionate plea for open-mindedness (not a message that’ll get stale any time soon.) But produced in 2025, the play raises other questions of particular relevance.
In frustration at a system we fear doesn’t guarantee justice, we now often assert Believe the victim. But that’s a tragic (though understandable) begging of the question. And it so readily slips into that perilous territory Miller warned of in The Crucible: “Is the accuser always holy now?” Hellman’s characterisation of Mary Tilford is a forthright challenge to any hope that justice comes easily.
But the play’s killer blow to moral naivety comes in the portrait of Mrs Tilford. Karen asserts that granddaughter and grandmother are of the same stock, and she means not biology, but the close kinship between self-interested deceit and self-righteousness. Both are revealed as expressions of the lust for control. In The Children’s Hour, Truth maybe fragile, but Goodness is fatally flawed. (Or, at least, Goodness with a capital G.) It’s a radical indictment of assumptions of moral superiority, and a gentle endorsement of humility and kindness. (And one of particular value in our current era in which many of us are tempted to Goodness, to that oversimplification whereby we confidently cast ourselves as warriors against evil, positing enemies where there are just people, people with the very same access to Truth as ourselves.)
The Children’s Hour is an absolutely gripping tale, and a deeply humane encouragement to moral maturity.
Paul Gilchrist
The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
Presented by Tiny Dog Productions and Dead Fly Productions
at the Old Fitz until March 1
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 