Lillian Hellman is remembered as an inveterate liar. It was said that in her writing, which encompassed plays and quasi-biographies, even the words ‘the’ and ‘and’ were suspect. Yet The Little Foxes is bitterly veracious, its melodramatic contours conceal a piercingly exact account of a post-antebellum American South, where new ways of acquiring wealth were being sought and the values that led it were morally execrable.
Taking its title from the Song of Solomon, where ‘the little foxes … spoil the vines’, Hellman’s play posits itself as a moral parable, however the redemptive lesson is conspicuously absent. The upstart Hubbard family, who accrued phenomenal wealth after the Civil War, are cut throat capitalists, out to pillage the world and, if necessary, each other. As the play opens, Regina, Oscar and Ben Hubbard are negotiating a deal to build a cotton mill that will catapult them to enviable millionairedom. Crucially, the final part of the investment lies in the bank account of Regina’s ailing husband, Horace, whose withholding of the money is explicable only as another patriarchal power play. It is to director Lyndsey Turner’s credit that our sympathies, for Regina and Horace especially, never alight for long.
As the disempowered female fox compelled to flash her teeth and fight for her own survival, Anne-Marie Duff is stirring as Regina. She prowls the stage in a sultry red dress, ready to set ruthless fire to anything in the name of self-preservation. Similarly excellent is her sister-in-law, Birdie, an old money Southern belle, incarnated with the fragility and delicacy of a fading flower by Anna Madeley. Ben and Oscar Hubbard (Mark Bonnar and Steffan Rhodri) are entertainingly insidious, scratching each other with insults and growling putdowns, and there are several wonderful comic moments in which Leo Hubbard (Stanley Morgan), their would-be heir, is moved around like an ineffectual chess piece.
Where the production fails to fly is in its incoherent set design and costume. The play is wrenched from its original Edwardian situation into an amorphous mid-century. Forties dresses are combined with an acid green Chesterfield sofa, whilst talk of travelling by horseback and scandal at young girls travelling unchaperoned is retained. Slight edits to the script would have facilitated coherence and allowed for the parallels with the ravening capitalism of the present that were otherwise established.
Rather impressively, the Young Vic’s production brings out the deftly wrought subtleties and ironies of Hellman’s writing, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of previous incarnations of the play, which were criticised for their obtrusive plotting and strident endorsement of liberal platitudes. The cast triumphs in elliptical passages of the play, where their characters wilfully close the doors on the truth it doesn’t suit them to hear.
In 1967 Elizabeth Hardwick called The Little Foxes a ‘curious […] catalogue of sentiment about the Old South’. As this production attests, Hellman was cleverer than that. At the hands of director Lyndsey Turner, the play is an achingly accurate vision of modern capitalism and its ruinous effect on our closest relationships. The Hubbards’ power games may be petty and ultimately nugatory, but we are never allowed to forget that foxes have sharp teeth and a very real capacity to maul all in sight.
The Little Foxes
Drama
By Lillian Hellman
Director: Lyndsey Turner
Photo credits: Johan Persson
Cast includes: Anne-Marie Duff; Mark Bonnar; Anna Madeley; Steffan Rhodri; John Light; Stanley Morgan; Eleanor Worthington-Cox; Andrea Davy; Freddie MacBruce.
Until: Saturday 8th February 2025
Running Time: 2 hours and 15 minutes, including a 20-minute interval