"The Children's Hour". Pilch. Review by Victoria Tayler

Scrap The Crucible, it’s all about this. The Children’s Hour is a devastating play, and the production company Silly Snail (this is anything but silly) delivered it so well that I leave teary-eyed and a little distraught. A Tesco meal deal later, and I’m half-back in the world, but when I walk past the cast on Broad Street, I can’t quite believe they’re smiling. I resist the urge to tell them how good they are and bottle it up for the review, stewing in the world of longing and grief that they’ve created and dismantled with ease.

If you’re not familiar with The Children’s Hour, here’s the gist: two women, Martha and Karen, have scraped and saved to open a small school in rural New England. They’re friends from college, close, ambiguously so. Karen is set to get married to Joe, a local doctor, a decision which Martha struggles to come to terms with. But such concerns become sidelined when Mary Tilford, one of their students, spreads the rumour they are in a queer relationship, ultimately ruining their lives. 

It’s a beautiful play, written in 1934, forerunning academic debates about ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ and Foucault’s panopticon by decades. And this team rises well to a complex, beautiful and essential text. There are good acting performances across the board. Elouise Wills, who plays Martha, is as big and consuming in the small, intimate moments of the play as she is in its climax, rendering visible the tenderness and horrors of her love. Mayah Savjani gives an equally strong performance, with a wide-eyed, shell-shocked, still, performance that nonetheless communicates a simmering sense of having been wronged, forever and unresolvably. 

Others are lighter on the palette. Joe (Eunsul Kim) is charming, even while swimming in delusions (Joe, I think your fiancee might be gay). Agatha, the housemaid (Anne Hensley Young), is hilarious, and plays the role with a slight hysterical adoration of her employer Mrs Tilford that could ring a little queer, reminding us of the ambiguities of human relationships, dynamics that exist undefined and unnamed. I enjoyed the expansion of the grocery boy into observer and town gossip. There’s an interesting immersive theatre moment where he spreads rumours in the interval. And Daphne Husson, Martha’s insufferable, image-obsessed, vacantly callous aunt, is undeniably excellent. 

The costume designer, Hina Ofuchi, is doing the WORK. Mortar wears a shimmering blue wide neck dress which somehow evokes the values of the stuffy gilded age. Tilford’s pearls and gloves go far in reminding of the imbalances of power associated with class in this play, and makes real a world where some egos run so big that the lives of others are made to shrink.

I’m intrigued by the choices of lighting director Nick Schneider. At first they struggled to win me over. We’re treated to hard flashes of red when Mary is doing her evil things, and a healthy dose of purple when Martha is doing her queer things. At one point, the two collide, and we get a rather loud display of red and purple lights which, honestly, I found distracted from the gravity of Martha’s confession and the fraught intimacy between our two talented leads. 

But a later choice makes me change my mind. In keeping with their decision to be bold, Schneider goes with a grilling white floodlight for the climax of the play. Karen stares out at the audience, lit from the side. As she realises what has befallen Martha, the lighting switches sides, and creates the impression of the image having flipped, a world being turned on its head. Like the rest of the show, it’s inspired and effective. This hour is theirs.