The Little Foxes
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...
