Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Family dramas sit at the heart of American theatre, beloved by so many of the great playwrights — among them Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill — as the locus for blistering emotional and political workouts. To their number we should also add Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, rarely performed and certainly flawed, but burning up the stage at London’s Young Vic in the hands of director Lyndsey Turner as a savage and prescient indictment of naked self-interest.As we join the action, the Hubbard brothers have made a mint in cotton, using old money (Oscar’s aristocratic wife, Birdie), business acumen (Benjamin’s sharply calculating mind) and ruthless employment practices. Now they are set to strike a deal with a Chicago businessman to build a local mill that will make them millionaires. When their estranged, gravely ill brother-in-law Horace (John Light) refuses the final essential backing, Benjamin and Oscar (Mark Bonnar and Steffan Rhodri, different shades of nasty and both excellent) plot a scheme to trick him. But they reckon without his wife, their sister Regina, who outmanoeuvres them all — and who is played with beady brilliance by Anne-Marie Duff.Written in 1939, the play was originally set in Alabama at the turn of the century, but Turner shifts it to the late Fifties or early Sixties, so we’re nearer in time to Williams and Miller, in a postwar world hell-bent on consumerism, with the feminist and civil rights movements simmering below the surface. Lizzie Clachan’s sleek set, all muted beige and burgundy, feels increasingly like an oppressive prison, where the two Black servants (Andrea Davey and Freddie MacBruce) work continuously as their future is thrashed out by their white bosses, and where Anna Madeley’s bright, fluttering Birdie has her wings clipped by her controlling husband every time she tries to open them.Birdie’s son, Leo (Stanley Morgan), and Regina’s daughter, Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), are lined up by the brothers as collateral: a (loveless) marriage between first cousins should cement the family wealth. Little wonder, then, that Duff’s Regina pounces like a panther when she spots her moment. Forged by the same world as her brothers, yet cut out of the spoils because of her gender, she’s as ruthless as they are, possibly even more so: her caustic dismissal of Horace’s hope of reconciliation is brutal.What follows is melodramatic — a flaw in the play that the production can’t quite overcome, and Hellman tends to hammer home her points. But Duff brings both diamond sharpness and subtlety to the part: we see a woman fighting with herself. She lights up with glee when she spots her chance to outsmart her brothers. Yet mixed emotions scud across her face as she realises the price of her triumph and as she takes in the fact that Alexandra doesn’t want what she has won for her. It’s with 17-year-old Alexandra that this staging leaves us, as she tries to wriggle free of her ghastly legacy. ★★★☆☆To February 8, youngvic.org
