The stock charge against Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes is that it is melodrama; and so, to some extent, it is. But with an actress as sensitive as Penelope Wilton, and a director as strong as Marianne Elliott, it is infinitely more than Southern hokum: a study in solitude and the corrupting power of greed.
Written in 1939 but set in 1900, Hellman's play deals ostensibly with the Hubbard family's dreams of avarice. Brothers Ben and Oscar are investing in a cotton mill that, they hope, will make their fortunes. They desperately need to raise capital from Horace Giddens, ailing husband of their sister Regina. Horace's reluctance leads the brothers illegally to "borrow" bonds from his safe deposit box, a theft that initially threatens to exclude Regina from the family windfall but which she finally turns to her advantage.
Money spins the plot; and Hellman is writing in part about the transition from the old to the new South and about the advance of amoral capitalism. The Hubbards are a grasping lot who will do anything for loot. Brother Ben has married the aristocratic Birdie purely for the sake of cotton. There are even plans afoot for Ben's no-good son to marry Regina's daughter to secure the family fortune. Hellman is both attacking Southern greed and suggesting the family that preys together stays together.
Wilton's immensely subtle performance lifts the play into another dimension: her Regina is as much victim as monster, and a powerful study in corrosive loneliness. She presents a woman who has entered in a loveless marriage and paid a heavy price: her only defence is a glacial cynicism. Wilton is a mistress of the charged pause who can hold back a crucial word to freight it with meaning - when Horace announces he has been ruminating on their marriage, she replies "you must tell me everything you thought ... someday." And when the dying Horace struggles to reach the stairs, Wilton stares implacably ahead without lifting a finger to assist - less, you feel, out of cruelty than because she sees her dreams of untold wealth evaporating. This is a tremendous performance which observes the acting rule of playing the character from her own point of view.
Wilton is finely supported by Matthew Marsh and David Calder as her avaricious brothers, and by Brid Brennan as the abused aristocratic Birdie. But the triumph of the evening is that Elliott's production acknowledges the play's melodramatic roots - with ghostly voices, ominous shadows, and a background of vast wrought iron staircases - while also suggesting the sadness and solitude that lies behind the elevation of money into a god.
Until November 24. Box office: 020-7369 1732.
