The Children’s Hour, Comedy Theatre

I’ve only myself to blame. I succumbed to the siren call of celebrity casting and I deserved all I got. In my slight defence, The Children’s Hour is (a) eighty years old, (b) playing at the Comedy Theatre and (c) directed by Ian Rickson, all of which should have been points in its favour. But I learned yesterday that just because a play is old it doesn’t mean it’s any good, that the Comedy Theatre doesn’t always play comedies, and that being the director of past hits doesn’t guarantee future successes.

I’m not sure quite where to start. I’d like to start with the good points, but there really aren’t many. The only unequivocally good thing I have to say is that it is beautifully lit, which is the kind of thing I look out for even when I’m enjoying a play, so that’s not quite the faint praise it sounds. I was also going to single out Bryony Hannah, who shines as schoolgirl Mary Tilford, but the things I was going to say were things like “she shows a lot of promise” and “her accent isn’t perfect, but for a teenager she does a tolerable job”, but having since learned that she is actually 26, I don’t feel quite so enthusiastically about her youthful talents. She is very good, though.

Ellen Burstyn is also good as Mary’s conflicted grandmother, and the only straightforwardly good scene in the play is one between the two of them, where the sense of a complicated but loving relationship is played out convincingly. Generally, Burstyn aside, the schoolchildren are better than the grown-ups at making us believe in them, and nowhere is this more painfully evident than in the relationship between Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss as a pair of old friends running a girls’ boarding school. They tiptoe around each other, barely look at one another and generally give the impression of two people who have only just met and aren’t quite sure how to treat one another. A generous interpretation would be that this is an intentional attempt at conveying an undercurrent of awkwardness between them, but the drama at the centre of the story only works if we can believe that they are genuinely close and loving friends, and, well, what it actually looks like is two actresses on a stage who have only just met and aren’t quite sure how to treat one another.

There’s also a problem with accents. The play is set in New England, and some of the accents sound vaguely New England. Others sound vaguely Bronx, and most of the schoolgirls manage a sort of transatlantic hybrid that more or less does the job, if you’re not listening too carefully. And then there’s Keira Knightley, who makes a brave stab at an American accent but regularly fails, sometimes to startling effect, as when a stream of cut-glass vowels suddenly appear mid-speech. I’m afraid I laughed. I’m afraid I wasn’t the only one.

I like Keira Knightley. I think she’s freakishly beautiful, and I think she’s perfectly cast in Pirates of the Caribbean and Atonement and Love, Actually, where she can be posh and beautiful and queenly and invulnerable. And she is all of those things, a bit, in The Children’s Hour, but the accent is so off, and as a result she is so obviously and noticeably Keira Knightley, that it’s a constant distraction, especially when she says “I’m nothing special to look at”. You’re Keira Knightley, you doof!

But, accent aside, Keira can’t help being weird and stilted, because the play is weird and stilted. The dialogue bears no resemblance at all to actual human speech, and we leap from random accusation to random accusation with very little time to learn anything about the characters. I didn’t care what happened to anyone, because I didn’t believe in any of them, or in their situation. I can’t decide whether this is the fault of the play or the production, but in this version, anyway, The Children’s Hour is a thin, narrow, mean little play and I can’t begin to understand why anyone thought it worth reviving. As the beloved said to me after it finally ended (it is very long) , the moral of the story appears to be that lying is bad, and women are worse.

I did quite enjoy myself, but for all the wrong reasons. And there were stretches where I was so bored that my mind wandered and I would suddenly realise I’d spent five minutes thinking about something else and no idea what had just happened (the answer was always “nothing”). Keira could barely bring herself to smile during the curtain call and I thought, I wonder whether she knows that this play is boring and stupid and bad? I hope not, but I suspect so.

All of which means that although I am madly tempted by this, which came via email this morning:

Starring Sienna Miller and Sheridan Smith, Flare Path is a story of love and loyalty, courage and fear, based on the experiences of Terence Rattigan as a tail gunner in the RAF during the Second World War.

I am going to learn from my mistakes and steer well clear.