Anne-Marie Duff is sharply excellent in this chilly staging of The Little Foxes at the Young Vic
“Maybe it’s easy for the dying to be honest”
If Scrooges and panto singalongs aren’t your thing, the Young Vic have lined up quite the anti-festive fare for you in the form of The Little Foxes. Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play is already a story of greed, ambition and a family on the edge but in Lyndsey Turner’s supremely chilly staging here, it’s a real indictment of spending time with those you’re related to so maybe it is a Christmas-themed show after all….
In deepest Alabama, the rich Hubbard family have gathered. Brothers Ben and Oscar are plotting more ways to grow their wealth but need their brother-in-law Horace to chip in too, only he has gone silent, away on a business trip. So they turn to his wife, their sister Regina, who relishes the chance to get involved for once but as more than money is put at stake in the negotiations, lines get crossed even though it is family involved.
You could argue it is a touch proto-Succession in its look at how money leads to unscrupulous behaviour no matter how close the blood ties are. And there’s a sense that Turner wants to amp this up as Lizzie Clachan’s wide, sparse design and Lucy Carter’s lighting chill things down without a hint of domesticity in this home. I’m not quite sure how the 1960s aesthetic quite squares with a play overtly set in 1900 though.
Watching awful people do awful things to each other also has a cooling effect that only really explodes in the play’s final stages. Anne-Marie Duff’s hugely ambitious Regina wrestling against societal constraints is finely done and Mark Bonnar’s Ben is deliciously malevolent as he sees everything as a game. As a contrast, Anna Madeley is strikingly good as the fragile Birdie, the woman Oscar married for her family’s plantation and is now barely tolerated by anyone, driving her to drink.
John Light, oddly working double duty, is powerfully effective as the wheelchair-bound Horace though. A mixture of some good deeds, in his defence of his daughter, and pretty much being heinous for the rest of the time, his conniving behaviour fits right into the family he’s married into, making the whole thing compellingly watchable, even if you’re not rooting for any of them. Merry Christmas.
