Theatre review: The Little Foxes

In what can reasonably be called an alternative to the cheery festive fare at most other theatres, the Young Vic offers up a winter show so unremittingly grim that Anne-Marie Duff agreed to star in it. Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes premiered in 1939, takes place in 1900 and has, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, been set sometime in the 1950s or '60s for Lyndsey Turner's production. At the centre of the story are three siblings, whose family wealth comes from cotton plantations; while slavery has long since been abolished, brothers Ben (Mark Bonnar) and Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) still control all the wealth in their Alabama town, but are trying to get in on a deal for a new cotton mill they hope will restore them to the even greater power their family used to have.

Sole sister Regina (Duff) was left out of the inheritance because of her sex, but as some of her sick husband's money is needed to complete her brothers' deal, she holds more of the cards than they realise. But if it seems like this will be a feminist story of a woman rising up and taking what she's been denied, the way she goes about it makes her far from a lead to cheer for.

The Little Foxes is a play that's hard to emotionally invest in straight away, as we open right in the details of the financial investment instead, but it's not long before the way the family conduct their business gives away a lot about who these people are: Ben is a constantly-scheming crook who could be accused of stabbing his siblings in the back if he didn't constantly do it to their faces; Oscar is more of a straightforward thug who bullies his alcoholic wife Birdie (Anna Madeley) and son Leo (Stanley Morgan,) and spends every morning hunting and then destroying the animal carcasses - seemingly for no other reason than he knows their black neighbours are starving and could have used the meat.

The various machinations are complicated further when Regina sends for her dying husband Horace (John Light) to be brought back from hospital, but her plan to have him hold her brothers to ransom for a bigger share that she'll then inherit is complicated by the fact that his time in the North, and facing up to his own mortality, have changed his priorities for the legacy he wants to leave his daughter Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox.)

Aside from Hellman's play itself, the issue that most kept me at a remove from the production was the aforementioned anachronistic design: Lizzie Clachan's set and costumes put us in the 1950s at the earliest, but aside from everyone constantly asking servant Cal (Freddie MacBruce) to get the horse and carriage ready, there's also a lot of references to the siblings' parents having been slaveowners - just how old were they when they had their kids, who are middle-aged nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation? The black residents of the town are also described as not having eaten meat since what's euphemistically called "cotton-picking times," and the idea that his "entitlement" was taken away from him when he was a child feels like a major reason why Oscar in particular is quite as unpleasant as he is.

I actually had to check the play's Wikipedia page at the interval to try and figure this out, and the setting in 1900 makes all of this make much more sense, but it still leaves the question of why Turner's done this specific, visual-only update: I could understand it more if it was a full present-day staging, highlighting how these attitudes to race, family and money aren't consigned to the past as much as we'd like to think, and run through the generations. But why a 1900s setting has been changed to a 1950s one for a 2020s audience is a distracting puzzle.

There are other elements of the play that make it hard to love: The plot takes a few too many red herring twists (at one point it looks like it's going to be about Alexandra disappearing,) and late on the family's housekeeper Addie (Andrea Davy) talks to Birdie about the people who don't perpetrate all this ill treatment but sit back and let it happen: It feels like this might be Hellman's ultimate point, but given how awful the siblings are, and the fact that it's addressed to another of their victims who's spent the whole play in a Blanche Dubois, fully pickled alcoholic stupor, it's hard for that message to make an impact.

And ultimately this is a melodrama that increasingly leans on the clichés of the genre: Jan was particularly irritated by Horace announcing his whole revenge plot against the family to Regina, before he's actually written his new will and while she's still got access to the medicine he needs to live - what could possibly happen next? Still, there are strong performances and the evening runs slickly enough, but by the time it becomes obvious the only question over the ending is which of a bunch of vile characters will come out on top, it's hard to care that much.

The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman is booking until the 8th of February at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.