Real drama trumped melodrama when young actor Stanley Morgan collapsed 10 minutes into the opening night of Lilian Hellman’s study of a rapaciously dysfunctional family in the American south of 1900.
It’s a credit to the rigour and focus of Lyndsey Turner’s production, led by the radiant Anne-Marie Duff, that when it restarted an hour late with Morgan on his feet again, it ran as smoothly as a machine. He got an ovation at the end and looked abashed.
There’s a reason Hellman is rarely done. Her plays can look overwrought and dated. The extended Alabama clan featured here make Tennessee Williams’s unhappy families look like the Waltons. But there’s a brutal internal logic to this 1939 work and a timeliness to Turner’s revival. A fine ensemble is anchored by a standout performance from Duff. She mines pathos and empathy from the character of Regina Giddens (nee Hubbard), who could be a monster.
When we meet them in middle age, the mercantile Hubbards have already screwed the old southern plantation-owning aristocracy and the white and black underclass in plundering their small, cotton-picking town. Turns out they will ruthlessly screw each other to make their wilder ambitions real, too. They are the people, as Regina’s beady brother Ben (Mark Bonnar) puts it, who will “own this country one day”. Well, now they do.
Ben and the brutish, none-too-bright third Hubbard sibling, Oscar (Steffan Rhodri), plan to partner with a Chicago businessman to build a mill by their cotton fields. But they need investment from Regina’s dying, estranged banker husband Horace Giddens (John Light) to do it.
Smart, ambitious and thwarted by the feudal misogyny of her society, Regina decides to get a slice of the pie. Horace is forced back into play in the family power game. Their sweet daughter Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) and Oscar’s dimwit son Leo (Morgan) become bargaining chips. Oscar’s broken wife Birdie (Anna Madeley) is collateral damage.
Duff embraces Regina’s coldness but lets us feel the rage and frustration that forged it and gives us a moment of fragility at the end. Bonnar is very good too as Ben, sleek in repose but with a raptor’s sudden, terrifying focus. His performance undoubtedly overshadows the understated character work of Rhodri as Oscar.
The rest of the cast do a good job fleshing out characters that are mostly functional. Andrea Davy and Freddie MacBruce build some dignity into Regina’s two black servants, sanctified but also stereotyped by Hellman.
Lizzie Clachan’s set is also functional but one side of it contains an assemblage of doors and steps so scary to negotiate it made my teeth ache. Like Turner’s direction, the lighting and sound design lean into the play’s borderline absurdity, especially in the overegged final confrontation.
But bloody hell, I never thought I’d see The Little Foxes, much less like it... and I basically loved it and also admired the audacity of the timing. Family tensions, rampant capitalism, excessive drinking, someone falling over. Yes, this is definitely a Christmas show.
The Young Vic, to Feb 8; youngvic.org
