The Little Foxes at the Young Vic – review

It’s 23 years since Lilian Hellman’s The Little Foxes was last seen on the London stage. On press night, as the director Lyndsey Turner wryly remarked, the wait continued when one of the actors fainted on stage – and there was an hour delay before he was well enough to continue.

You can see why this play is not often performed. It’s a savagely dark melodrama about the infighting of the unpleasant Hubbard family, the little foxes who “eat the earth and all the people on it”, in their greed and ambition. It’s arguably over-emphatic and sometimes clunky in its presentation of its themes.

But it has at its heart an absolute stunner of a role for an actor – Regina Hubbard, disempowered wife of the weak and sick Horace, who is manipulating her way to a share of the spoils of her brothers’ business machinations. It’s a role that Bette Davis made famous in a 1941 film adaptation – and one that Anne-Marie Duff seizes here with charismatic power.

Written in 1939, but set in 1900, the play is partly about the economic power of the American South as it transforms itself into a force for the 20^th century. Turner has chosen to set it some time in the 1950s with a sleek design by Lizzie Clachlan that leavens the taupe and beige neutrals of the set with bright splashes of lime (for a sofa) and red (for Regina).

This confuses the action with its reference to horses, carriages and the loss of a plantation once owned by the family of Regina’s sister-in-law Birdie (a wonderfully poignant Anna Madeley) her dreams of a gracious life now battered out of her by the violent unpleasantness of her husband Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) who married her only for status and her name.

But the modernity of the setting brings the relevance of the play into sharp focus. Hellman’s concern is not with the past, but with the contemporary attitudes of a society that is either rapacious or that stands by watching as others are exploited. Only the two Black servants, played with suppressed intensity by Andrea Davy and Freddie MacBruce are omitted from the ferocity of her attack.

It’s a remarkably vicious play, and Turner leans into both the Gothic sensibility and the fury. Lucy Carter’s lighting darkens to a success of shafts of light and shadows as the action moves towards its denouement. When Regina’s brother Ben, an outwardly suave Mark Bonnar, grabs her to remind her that Southern women achieve more with a smile than a frown, his sheer malice is terrifying. Her husband Horace is lent dignity by John Light, but his weakness is mental as well as physical; he cannot fight the force of the Hubbards.

Rhodri makes Oscar, who obsessively kills animals and birds he cannot eat – “a hideous slaughter” – the worst kind of bully, weak as well as aggressive, while his son Leo (an excellent Stanley Morgan, happily restored from his collapse) is arrogant, violent and a thief. The only note of hope in the entire saga is that the gentle Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) escapes a forced marriage with him.

In this bleak context, Regina is both monstrous and fighting to survive. Duff plays her as a woman barely in control of her own nervous energy, her hand constantly shooting to her mouth as she tries to disguise her excitement or her fear. She’s constantly on the balls of her feet, ready to spring, locked in a marriage with Horace that is as bleak as any in Strindberg, and longing for her share of the wealth that her brothers are seeking to unlock. “I wanted the world,” she cries, with both desperation and unchecked avarice.

The terrible look on her face, the slow dawning smile hidden behind her hand, as she realises she has achieved her ambition by the foulest of means, creates an unforgettable image of a woman who thinks she has won but has in fact lost all humanity and love. The Little Foxes may be old-fashioned, but it still packs a desolate and depressing punch.