Cast

Synopsis

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Directors Notes

So much has been written recently about Lillian Hellman, that one tends to forget that she has been one of America’s (and in my view, the World’s) foremost playwrights for almost forty years. In England not many of her plays have been produced, apart from “The Little Foxes,” which we staged quite recently, and “The Children’s Hour,” both of which were also very successful films. A collected edition of all her plays was published a year or two ago, and suddenly the English public realized what they had been missing.

“Watch on the Rhine,” is, of course, a political play, but it is much much more than that, It is concerned with the freedom of the individual; it is concerned with the individual’s struggle against “the system” -any system; it poses the question “How much do you value your freedom, and how much will you sacrifice to keep it?”

We none of us need to be reminded how pertinent these questions are today.

So, although the scene of the play is America in 1940 when we were already at grips with oppression, the play comes as a timely reminder to those of us who remember, and as a warning to those who do not.

However, we do not present the play as a political pamphlet, but as an exciting, moving and at times, amusing experience. Like life, in fact!