The Little Foxes

The plot of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes (given the French title La Vipère here) is pure soap. Foxes or vipers, the Hubbards are not a family you want to be born into. Ben and Oscar are wealthy Southern aristocrats looking for a third investor to expand their enterprise and, their sister Regina not having inherited a share of the parental fortune, they turn to her husband Horace to stump up the remainder. Old, heart-diseased Horace refuses. So, after a failed grab at his cash by trying to marry Oscar’s son Leo to Horace and Regina’s daughter, they decide to simply steal bonds out of his safe. Blackmailing and backstabbing ensue.

At the centre of Thomas Ostermeier’s German-language update is Regina, played by Nina Hoss. Scheming against her brothers and husband in her own materialist pursuit, the Aryan ice queen is the story’s ostensible villain and viper. But Hoss gives us an engrossing protagonist who’s difficult to condemn wholly: she has, after all, had to marry into the money that was her brothers’ birthright, and at the play’s denouement she’s left alone, a platinum-helmeted husk with only sleek black sofas for comfort. Her marriage to Horace also makes for brilliant drama, their first awkward embrace after his five months in hospital so painfully loveless that it’s actually funny.

There’s plenty of bleak comedy in fact, particularly from Oscar’s wife Birdie – a tragi-camp alcoholic who flaps maniacally around her gilded cage and the rest of her restrained family. Mark Waschke and David Ruland are compelling as the two brothers, cocky and domineering with Regina and Birdie one minute, bowing and scraping to frail, stern Horace the next.

Jan Pappelbaum’s minimalist set is a soulless open-plan interior, and also an evidently dramatic space. The expansive floor allows for excruciating distance between the cast, and a slowly rotating revolve centre-stage is an intriguing touch: like money and power in the play, it shifts constantly, unexpectedly and almost imperceptibly, as each person finds the ground beneath them not so steady as they thought. A smooth soundtrack and long, reflective transitions also give pace to the piece – the stage is often empty between scenes and even then the action might be partially concealed, leaving a kind of cold vacuousness.

In the jump from post-bellum South to the modern day, some of the finer plot points don’t quite add up: how many Americans now would leave nothing to their daughters – or consider a marriage between cousins, for that matter? But the staging’s riveting tension leaves such concerns for the most part, shall we say, gone with the wind, and it does well to tone down some of the original’s melodrama. What could have been a monochrome German Dynasty is, in Ostermeier’s hands, a bitter fox-eat-fox tragedy of late capitalism; Regina’s final, grim stand-off with Horace even has echoes of the opening to Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money. For a mid-twentieth century text, this feels depressingly contemporary.

The Little Foxes played at Les Gémeaux in Paris. For more information see the Les Gémeaux website.