The Autumn Garden review Hellman's unhappy guests overstay their welcome

Jermyn Street theatre, London
A strong cast imbue Lillian Hellman’s 1951 play with a keen malaise, though they are shackled by the author’s enervating attitude towards her characters

A group of sad people gather in a small guesthouse in the Gulf of Mexico and either confront or evade the illusions on which their lives rest. It sounds like a play by Tennessee Williams. In fact, it is the situation in this 1951 piece by Lillian Hellman now getting its British premiere. But eager as I am to see neglected work, I agree with Harold Clurman, the play’s original Broadway director, who said that Hellman doesn’t really love her characters.

They are certainly an unhappy bunch. Constance, the lonely proprietor, pines for a drunken guest. Two marriages seem permanently on the edge of fracture. A spoilt rich boy is in thrall to a predatory, although unseen, gay novelist. The problem with the play, which meanders along for three hours, is that you are never sure whether the characters are prey to the enervating romanticism of the American south or are victims of some larger, national malaise. It is significant that the only clear-sighted character is a young European refugee, and the idea that we need to accept moral responsibility for our actions is straight out of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Anthony Biggs’s production creates the right atmosphere of crumbling decay and is strongly cast. Hilary MacLean as the solitary house-owner, Tom Mannion as a laconic general, Lucy Akhurst as his flaky wife and Mark Healy as a failed artist making a fruitless homecoming all give very good performances. But if one was going to revive rare Hellman, I suspect the luridly gothic Toys in the Attic (1960) would be a better bet.

• At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 29 October. Box office: 020-7287 2875.

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