Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes is a bleak study in moral ambivalence and lethally suppressed ambition. Not performed in this country in almost a quarter century, I’d wondered if the passage of time might have made its scheming Southerner protagonist Regina more sympathetic. After careful consideration: maybe. A bit.
Spoiler alert, but by the end Regina has torn apart pretty much everyone in her life in an effort to secure the property and power denied to her as a woman by living in the Deep South in the year 1900.
Hellman was clearly not unsympathetic on this point, but at the same time Regina was most famously embodied by Bette Davis in the 1941 film as a femme fatale-slash-psychopath-slash-walking allegory for the pernicious effects of capitalism (the author being an actual commie).
In Lyndsey Turner’s elegant revival, Anne-Marie Duff is certainly not in any way camp or hammy. Rather, she is icy-cold and laser focused, an apex predator battling her way through a harsh, dangerous capitalist jungle. Her prey is her two brothers – Mark Bonnar’s cruel schemer Ben and Steffan Rhodri’s hapless bully Oscar – and her embittered, wheelchair-bound husband Horace (John Light). Like a lion attacking a herd of buffalo, her success is far from guaranteed and dumb luck aids her machinations to take control of a family cotton mill as much as her killer instinct. But succeed she does, with a cold eyed grimness that’s both satisfying and horrifying.
In a tremendous performance, Duff shows us the rage and frustration that underpin Regina’s actions – she might not have done any of this if society simply let her be a businesswoman. But it’s hard to really take satisfaction in her victory. When the play ends with Regina’s task complete but the only nice people in her life – her daughter Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) and Oscar’s put upon wife Birdie (Anna Madeley) – thoroughly alienated from her, it’s hard to know how to feel other than exhausted.
The strangest thing about Turner’s revival is the aggressively beige ’60s boardroom aesthetic to Lizzie Clachlan’s set and costumes. The play is very, very definitely set in the Deep South of 1900 and it feels somewhat jarring to, on the one hand, remove this from the production visually, but on the other hand replace it with something relatively non-specific. If it had been a straight up modern dress take I’d have seen the point; as it is it’s both naggingly odd and a little dull to look at.
Confusing design quirks aside, it’s a chic and steely revival of a play that is both fascinating and (understandably) rarely done. Regina is an uncomfortable figure – there are in theory good reasons to root for her, but what she wants and does is terrible. Capitalism and feminism are mixed up, in an icky way. Duff humanises her to a degree, but ultimately she is a monster, who seeks not to liberate the repressive society that created her, but to control it. It’s a grim story, lacking in catharsis. But it’s impressively done.
