by Lillian Hellman
Directed by Eda Holmes
At the Royal George Theatre
May 3-November 1, 2008

    The Little Foxes may be Lillian Hellman’s best play. Set in a small Alabama town in 1900, it is a tale of greed, exploitation, and malicious evil. It centres on the Hubbards, prosperous Southern capitalists who require more capital (this time from Chicago in the north) to finance a cotton mill. Ben Hubbard tells his sister Regina: “The world is open. Open for people like you and me. Ready for us, waiting for us.” He is sly and corrupt, just as she is shrewd and manipulative. Hellman isn’t really excoriating the South, because she knows that the little foxes can exist anywhere. However, she uses her own family history and knowledge of the South to create an extraordinary atmosphere of manipulation, theft, extortion, and blackmail. It’s quite a family on stage: Oscar mistreats his unhappy wife, Birdie, almost the way he ravages the land. Ben gruffly controls the family business, and Regina never allows family feeling to get in the way of her blatant self-interest and machinations to get the upper hand over the rest of her family. When her ailing banker-husband, Horace Giddens, does not give his consent to seal the deal about the new mill, she cruelly gets her revenge, watching him die as she withholds his crucial medicine. Regina is a flamboyantly rapacious creature etched in acid, yet more than simply a callous bitch. If she has gone down in stage and movie history as primarily a sinful villainess, it has been because of vividly direct performances by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway and Bette Davis in film.

     Laurie Paton in Eda Holmes’ generally well-balanced production tries to paint a more complex portrait of what could easily be a melodramatic character. Attractively accoutred by Cameron Porteous, who is also responsible for the fine set with its heavy furniture and lacy curtains (effectively lit by Kevin Lamotte), Ms. Paton makes good use of her furry voice. She shows Regina’s strengths as well as her vulnerability. What she lacks is the sort of iciness that both Bankhead and Davis had. Her Regina is to be respected with wary caution rather than feared with awe and trembling.

     One of the admirable things in this production is its restraint. It knows the play’s links to Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams without forcing them. After all, the Hubbards are a post-Civil War Southern family who fancy themselves aristocrats. They carry the seeds of tragedy within them but they don’t go around lamenting or calling down divine retribution. Some of them suffer (Birdie, in particular, in Sharry Flett’s extraordinarily sensitive and moving interpretation) and Regina exults, but the story is a moral fable rather than a classic tragedy. Accordingly, some of the key players in the cast show sound judgement and scale in their characterizations, revealing Hellman’s overall design for her family horror show. Ric Reid is a fine Ben, rancid beneath his surface sophistication. Peter Krantz’s Oscar is a vile wife-abuser, and Gray Powell is a credible lowlife as Leo while Krista Colosimo does well as bewildered, apprehensive Alexandra Giddens. The only failure (though a significant one) is David Jansen as Horace because the actor seems out of place in acting style, and lacks both the personality and force to make this affecting victim count in the bitter family contest of greed. 

Photos: David Cooper

pic 1: Laurie Paton as Regina

pic 2: Krista Colosimo (Alexandra Giddens) and Sharry Flett (Birdie Hubbard)

pic 3: David Jansen (Horace Giddens) and Krista Colosimo (Alexandra)





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