The accumulation of profit is the key overriding rule of the capitalist system, even if that means brutally exploiting employees or peddling lethal products to consumers. How else can we explain the Grenfell deaths or the absurdity known as Thames Water? No person is exempt from its destructive impulse, as the fossil fuel industry seems determined to demonstrate to the entire planet.
The profiteers even destructively wreck their own lives. Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, first performed in 1939, illustrates this process in one family living in a Southern State in America in the early 20th century.
Ben (Mark Bonnar) and Oscar Hubbard have made a deal with Marshall, a Chicago industrialist, to bring a cotton mill to their Southern cotton plantations. When Marshall (John Light) refers to them as the old aristocracy, Ben points out that the old aristocracy was useless and swallowed up by his class. He points out that Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) gained wealth by marrying Birdie (Anna Madeley), one of that old class. Although she disapproves of the Hubbard family’s cruelty, she is dominated by them.
The deal with Marshall may look good, but they need Horace (William Marshall), the banker husband of their sister Regina, to throw his money into the pot. They promise Marshall the water necessary for production along with labour cheaper than Massachusetts, where Marshal tells them, “they earn eight a week,” to which Ben replies, “there isn’t a mountain white or town negro who wouldn’t give his right arm for three silver dollars a week.”
Horace comments, “sure they’ll take less when you get to swinging them off against each other.”
Regina, like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, has bought into the cutthroat system. She arranges to get Horace back from the hospital where he is recuperating from a heart condition. Impatient and insensitive to her husband’s fragile state, she demands he invests the money, but the nearness of death and five months in a hospital has softened his priorities. He tells her, “you wrecked the town and live off it… I’ll do no more harm now, I’ve done enough… I’ll die my own way and I’ll do it without making the world any worse.”
Regina will become ruthless in her determination to get her way. Nevertheless, she won’t win her daughter Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) into the world of money and is busy losing the affection of those around her. Anne-Marie Duff gives the performance directed by Lyndsey Turner a softer appearance than it is often played.
The Little Foxes is a clear, watchable production that still accurately depicts the cruelty of a world ruled by the pursuit of profit. In the words of Regina’s African American servant Addie (Andrea Davy), “there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it… Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.”
Reviewer: Keith Mckenna