Anne-Marie Duff is fascinatingly nasty in Lyndsey Turner’s uneven Little Foxes

The name might sound like a twee landfill indie band but Lillian Hellman’s rarely staged 1939 play The Little Foxes is, in actuality, a snarling crepuscular thing. Director Lyndsey Turner strips away any possible hint of cosiness from this story of a self-destructing family of southern landowners – with a result that’s intriguing but hard to love.

The story unfolds in the ugly wreckage of the post-slavery South, where greedy brothers Benjamin (Mark Bonnar) and Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) are desperately trying to gather funds to build a cotton factory on their land – and to bring them the millions they feel are their birthright. They need their sister Regina (Anne-Marie Duff) to get on board, but her sick husband is stalling, and tempers are boiling over.

Duff is a fascinatingly nasty creation here, exuding a brittle glamour in her blood-red gown as she dreams of a better life in Chicago, bought with the sweat of underpaid labourers: her chosen survival strategy in this patriarchal clan is to exploit others in turn. Her addled, childlike sister-in-law Birdie (Anna Madeley) chooses another path, numbing her pain with reveries of a more comfortable past.

She could be straight out of a melancholy Tennessee Williams play but Hellman’s harsher story refuses to indulge in wistful visions of soft lives built on hard slave labour. Benjamin and Oscar are grasping crooks, and the women who buy pretty dresses with their money are no better – as housekeeper Addie (Andrea Davy) outlines in her cryptic but pointed comments about the people who “eat the earth”. Turner’s staging makes the calculated decision not to romanticise this family, showing them as the grasping parasites they are.

Lizzie Clachan’s set design takes its cues from the factory they’re squabbling over: bare grey concrete; no paintings or fine furnishings to give them a veneer of nobility. All that grey isn’t enough to dull the lurid melodrama of Hellman’s play. Yes, her dialogue is intricately woven, everyone talking over and across each other, too self-absorbed to understand each other. And yes, there’s a fascinating proto-feminism in the way that Birdie and Regina’s put-upon daughter Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) constantly have their speeches framed as foolishness or misbehaviour, the play’s men always ready to ignore the uncomfortable content of what these overlooked women are saying.

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But the structure of this play still clanks like old machinery towards an inevitable conclusion, one that lands heavily here. Turner heightens the story’s early moments of violence, which dims its power to shock later on.

And Regina is such a monster in this production that it’s hard to feel any kind of surprise or sympathy as she manipulates and is manipulated in turn. Like Hellman’s best-known play The Children’s Hour, Little Foxes is a compelling study of female nastiness, and the way that women become hard as polished fingernails under the brutal pressures of the patriarchy and capitalism. It’s undeniably powerful. Still, this production’s uneven performances and dour staging don’t make a particularly seductive case for revisiting it.

‘The Little Foxes’ is at the Young Vic Theatre until 8 February 2025