Once or twice during director Ian
Rickson’s wordless prologue and the first scene set during a girls’
boarding school’s “sewing and elocution hour”, I was worried that he
was so over-emphasising the pubescent girls’ awakening sexual impulses
that the evening might turn into
The Devils. This proved unfounded. The more apt comparison is with passages of collective frenzy in
The Crucible,
especially once the plot gathers momentum. In Lillian Hellman’s 1934
drama as in Arthur Miller’s two decades later, scandalous accusations
are made against innocent parties for motives of petty revenge, are
maintained by the young female accuser manipulating her fellows and are
seized upon by a credulous community. Miller used claims of witchcraft
as a metaphor for McCarthyite persecutions; Hellman (who would herself
be no stranger to the HUAC) centres her plot on allegations that the
two schoolmistresses are lovers. In each case, the subject matter
becomes less dramatically vital than the pathology of the lie and the
resultant hounding.
Rickson’s cast
boasts three generations of international screen names. As the
grandmother of young accuser Mary (Bryony Hannah as a gymslip Iago),
Ellen Burstyn is every inch the
grande dame;
as the ageing-actress aunt of one of the central pair, whose unguarded
words are twisted into calumny, Carol Kane loses no opportunity to be
daffy, chiffon-scarf-waving and all. And at the centre of things are
Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Moss.
As
regards Knightley, we critics might learn from our treatment of Kevin
Spacey in his first years at the artistic helm of The Old Vic: we
constantly questioned his dedication, but he persevered and showed how
over-eager we had been to belittle his commitment. Similarly, Knightley
follows up her début on this stage just over a year ago in
The Misanthrope
with another performance that shows diligence, intelligence and
subtlety. She just has the edge on Moss, who is at isolated moments
prey to the screen actor’s affliction when onstage of over-compensating
by making gestures or expressions too broad. Knightley, however,
plausibly plays a character slightly older than herself, and finds
truth in unexpected places, such as by going physically gawky from
grief in the final minutes. Hellman’s play is over-reliant on narrative
convenience at several points, but disguises it well, and Rickson’s
production does it proud.
Written for the Financial
Times.