THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

Lillian Hellman

11th -14th November 2009, Sheffield University Drama Studio

 

 

PICTURE GALLERY

Midland Players Amateur Dramatic Society, Sheffield, UK

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:

The Playwright - Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman was born in 1905 in New Orleans and had studied at  New York University and Columbia before writing The Children’s Hour in 1934. It was her first taste of success followed by American classics such as The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest both of which dealt with injustice, greed and hatred. Both The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour were made into films establishing Hellman’s name in Hollywood.   

She was a well- known left wing activist who testified before the House of Un-American Activities which blacklisted many Hollywood stars and writers for being Communist or having Communist sympathies. Although she was dismissed by the Committee with the quip, “Why cite her for contempt? After all, she is a woman..." she was blacklisted from the 1940s to the 1960s along with her partner, the crime writer, Dashiell Hammett. The creative exile forced her to sell her house; however, subsequently, she did teach at New York University, Harvard, Yale and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lillian Hellman died in 1984 having been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and had received the Gold Medal for Drama from The National Institute of Arts and Letters.

The Production

The play toured in a National Theatre production, stopping here in Sheffield in 1995. Mary Tilford, a child of between 12 and 14 years old was played by Emily Watson who was 28 years old. Mary is frequently portrayed by an adult.

In The Midland Players production, however, all of the girls are between 10 and 12 years old, testing them to play parts that are complicated and emotionally profound, particularly for the girls acting as  Mary, Rosalie, Peggy and Evelyn. In fact, it’s a demanding play on all of the actors and crew, not least because there are three mothers and daughters involved. This is in direct contrast to the characters for whom no mother exists on stage, especially Mary who swears on the grave of her father, hinting at a troubled past that long precedes the opening of the play.

The play presented a specific challenge to me as director starting with the casting of my own daughter as Mary and asking her to step into a role that lives very heavily in shadow rather than light. Some would say there are easier ways to face the trials and tribulations of the pre teen years.  Asking Clare Essam to be assistant director mitigated many of the possible difficult moments. It would not have happened without her. Nor without the dedication and commitment of the entire cast and crew who survived swine flu among other ordeals to make it to opening night.

The Play

The freshness of the script makes it seem like a play written in contemporary times and thematically it explores issues that are still not easy topics.  The girls are not necessarily kind to one another; most of them spend the first scene being antagonistic to each other in subtle ways, ways that seem entirely reflective of a boarding school environment where they spend a great deal of time together in a remote place.

The bullying that ensues is characteristic of an institutional setting where the origin of the problem is perceived but not fully understood.  Karen and Martha are just becoming clear about Mary’s influence on the other girls after a year of her being there. Mary’s reaction to their suspicions lead to her actions, the grim consequences which she could never imagine or consider given her great unanswered needs.

Mary’s intuition leads her to a truth unrealised until that critical moment and one which she does not understand, having read about it in a book without fully comprehending the meaning.  At that time, an adult might not have believed that a child could apply a fiction to reality with such conviction and focused determination without there being some truth behind it. Even Martha, Karen and Joe struggle with it to the detriment of all three, swept along by a grandmother’s blind faith in a child’s innocence and ignorant fear of corruption by homosexuality.  

In the twenty-first century we incarcerate children for criminal actions not always considering the naïve nature of their intentions. Today, perhaps, we believe too much and have moved too far down the other end of the continuum.  Emotionally they are still children and are responsive to a more visually violent world around them.  We do not know what happens to Mary but we can guess that she is incarcerated in her grandmother’s world, forever trapped beneath the truth she inadvertently uncovered.

                                                                    Valerie Monti Holland  

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