Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour
directed by Rob Kempson
A drama in three acts by Lillian Hellman, first performed in 1934, The Children’s Hour examines the destructive power of accusation and the fragility of trust within a closed community. Drawing on a real 19th-century case in Edinburgh, the play centres on a girls’ boarding school run by Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, whose lives are upended by a student’s calculated lie.
What begins as a child’s attempt to evade punishment escalates into a scandal that dismantles reputations, relationships, and livelihoods. As the accusation spreads, its consequences prove irreversible, exposing the ways fear, prejudice, and suspicion can take hold with devastating force.
Department of Theatre, York University
