Review of The Little Foxes at Young Vic: The Endearing and Evergreen Allure of Venomous Family Ties

Rated 🍯🍯🍯🍯

Cast of The Little Foxes at curtain call at the Young Vic

What is a family if not a web of lies and deceit? Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, brought to vivid life at the Young Vic, is directed with a sharp eye for the play’s salacious heart. This production doesn’t so much seek to tug at the heartstrings as it does to tighten its grip around them. In a theatre landscape often obsessed with soul-stirring profundity, The Little Foxes reminds us of the timeless appeal of a venomous family saga that is both entertaining and resonant. The bee thoroughly enjoyed itself.

While Anne-Marie Duff’s Regina has received near-universal acclaim for her razor-sharp portrayal, some critics have questioned whether the production’s melodrama skates too close to caricature. Others, however, celebrate its unapologetically theatrical flair. For this bee, it was a gripping evening that delivered precisely what it promised: a juicy, over-the-top soap opera of a play that also prods at the darker instincts of human nature.

The Allure of the Family Soap Opera

Warning: spoilers ahead.

What makes a family drama so irresistibly engaging? Perhaps it’s the thrill of peeking behind closed doors to uncover the rot beneath the veneer of civility. For this bee, the production’s grip was bolstered by a readiness to embrace its melodramatic roots. Not every night at the theatre must demand a complete re-evaluation of one’s existence. Sometimes, it’s enough to sit back and revel in a well-told tale of greed, ambition, and inevitable ruin. The Little Foxes delivers this with aplomb, and in doing so, it transcends mere entertainment. Its exploration of inevitability—how circumstance drives human behavior—left me reflecting long after the curtain fell. Plus, who doesn’t love a good verbal slap-fight over brandy?

A House of Traps: The Unchanging Set

The staging at the Young Vic deserves special mention. Set entirely in the living room of Regina’s home, the design is both intricate and evocative. The audience is drawn into the space, positioned as silent witnesses—flies on the wall, furniture in the room. The effect is one of voyeuristic intimacy, as though the Hubbards’ secrets and schemes are unfolding just for us.

The unchanging set isn’t merely practical; it’s symbolic. Those four walls become a cage, a claustrophobic reminder of the characters’ entrapment. For Regina, it’s a prison she can never truly escape, despite her machinations to seize control of her life. This clever design choice reinforces the play’s central theme: freedom is an illusion when society dictates the limits of one’s ambitions. Far from making the production static, the living room’s stifling permanence amplifies the tension, creating a sense that these characters are rats trapped in a box, doomed to gnaw at one another until nothing remains. It’s a family potluck with all the charm of a mousetrap factory.

Regina Hubbard: The Woman Behind the Ambition

Anne-Marie Duff’s portrayal of Regina brings a simmering intensity to the role, showing a woman whose every move is calculated yet steeped in desperation. Critics have praised Duff for making Regina feel human rather than monstrous, and this bee wholeheartedly agrees. Regina is less a villain and more a victim of her time, her gender, and her circumstances.

To label Regina as “pure evil” would be both reductive and lazy. Yes, she manipulates, deceives, and betrays, but these actions stem from a life lived in a cage. This is a woman whose aspirations—to wealth, power, and freedom—are systematically denied by a patriarchal society that demands she remain dependent on men. While it is easy to cast her off as a shallow being overly driven by material aspirations, it is worth remembering that any other aspiration (besides being a wife, mother and homemaker) would have been met by society with the same level of contempt and scorn. Similarly, while Regina's seeming lack of concern for her own child's welfare may be seen as monstrous, but again, it is likely that motherhood was thrust upon this woman by society. The bee is not sure that she was given much of a choice in the matter. That does not give her the license to be a bad mother, but it does make her actions feel tragically inevitable in a world that offers her no fair choices.

The bee humbly submits, therefore, that the question of whether her ambition can be admired without excusing her methods is a thorny one. Perhaps the greater tragedy is that there’s no alternative. The society Hellman depicts offers no morally upright path for a woman like Regina to achieve her goals. She can play the game or be destroyed by it. And so, her victory—if it can be called that—comes at a steep cost: the destruction of her family and her own soul. That's the chilling thought that the bee left with, and that's saying something when the temperatures in London were sub-zero that night!

The Hubbards: Cold Logic and Venomous Bonds

Ah, the Hubbards. If there’s a more venomous brood in theatre, this bee has yet to see it. Ben and Oscar, played with oily charm and barely concealed malice, are perfect foils to Regina’s calculating ambition. Where Regina’s actions are fueled by desperation and a desire for freedom, her brothers embody cold, unrepentant greed. It’s the kind of familial love that makes you wonder if these people ever managed a civil dinner without somebody hiding arsenic in the soup.

Ben and Oscar’s logic is transactional to the core, and while it’s easy to detest their avarice, one can’t help but concede its brutal honesty. Family loyalty? The bee has always had its reservations about the concept. The idea that blood ties automatically come with love and loyalty is, frankly, absurd when you think about it. Families are just collections of people thrown together by accident of birth, and expecting them to unconditionally adore and support one another feels more like wishful thinking than reality.

The Hubbards are an extreme but fascinating example of this. Their familial connections are incidental, and their behavior is shaped by their shared values—or lack thereof. The bee can't help but admire the honesty with which the characters embrace their inner convictions, even as its blood boils with contempt.

The play slyly critiques this strange expectation that love and loyalty should “just exist” by showing how misplaced loyalty can be destructive. Imagine if Regina had clung to some misguided notion of family unity while her brothers plotted to cut her out of the deal. Her ruthlessness is born out of necessity, not malice. She understands that loyalty is a luxury she can’t afford, and in a way, that makes her a tragic figure. If we strip away the romanticism of family, are the Hubbards really any worse than colleagues in a cutthroat office or rivals in any competitive field? Are the Hubbards despicable, tragic, or just painfully human? The bee is not sure.

The Inevitability of Venom

The tragedy of The Little Foxes lies in its inevitability. From the opening scene, there’s an inescapable sense that things will end badly, not because the characters are irredeemable, but because their circumstances demand it. Hellman’s world is one where ambition and survival are mutually exclusive with morality. The question isn’t whether the Hubbards will destroy one another, but how much collateral damage they’ll leave in their wake.

This deterministic quality might feel bleak, but it’s also brutally honest. The play offers no hope, no redemption, and perhaps that’s what makes it so compelling. It holds a mirror to our own venomous instincts and asks, “What would you do in their place?” The answers are never easy, and that’s precisely the point.

In the end, The Little Foxes is a triumph of venom and vitriol, a salacious family drama that revels in its own darkness. The Young Vic’s production captures the essence of Hellman’s play, delivering a night of theatre that is as entertaining as it is unsettling. Anne-Marie Duff leads a stellar cast, and while the play may not leave you with warm, fuzzy feelings, it will undoubtedly leave you thinking. And really, isn’t that what good theatre is all about?

Four stars!

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Watched January 2025 at the Young Vic Theatre in London.

A note on tickets: For great value tickets, try the TodayTix rush, where you should be able to get stalls seats for £25 pp. The staging is such that you should have a clear view irrespective of where you sit, but it is a rather wide stage, so you may want to be as close to the middle of the row as possible to avoid stretching out your neck.