Comes close to perfection: Watch on the Rhine, at the Donmar Warehouse, reviewed

Watch on the Rhine is the curiously misleading title chosen by Lillian Hellman for a wartime family drama that became a film starring Bette Davis. The location is not Europe but America and the show opens with Fanny Farrelly, a member of the New England gentry, arriving in her sumptuous drawing room for breakfast. The character of Fanny is an instant classic. A crashing snob, a bundle of nerves, a lethally bitchy matriarch, she dominates her household by cultivating favourites and crushing enemies with her venomous tongue. And yet her servants treat her with tolerance and affection. To them she seems a tricky but essentially decent oddball who needs careful handling. When they complain about her behaviour, she graciously accepts their chastisement and apologises for overstepping the mark.

This brilliant and complex portrait of a magnificently truculent American dowager feels like an essay in realism rather than a fictional effort. Patricia Hodge delivers a sublime performance.