Lillian Hellman in 1976. A revival of her 1939 drama The Little Foxes, now sadly postponed, could signal a new trend for how the Gate Theatre interprets the American playbook. Photo: The Advertising Archives
The hold that the American Dream has on Ireland and its diaspora doesn't need much explanation here. In the words of a Chuck Berry song: “Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’.”
Vested interests in that dream, or wide-eyed interest in its collapse, might explain a consultants’ report in 2015, which found that the most consistently popular genre at the Gate Theatre was the American classic. Since then, the theatre continued delivering nostalgic Americana, with a dizzying immersive production of The Great Gatsby, a nightmarish staging of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins, and a glossy revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.
Next in line was Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drama The Little Foxes, but it’s been sadly postponed by the shutdown. Set in early-century Alabama, the play follows a corrupt family of cotton plantation owners, and their desperate bid to construct a new cotton mill.
Hellman is an interesting marquee name for the Gate, which has nearly always gravitated towards male American authors - David Mamet, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and so on. The Little Foxes might sooner find a peer in the theatre’s 2016 production of Ruth Goetz’s The Heiress, written with her husband Augustus Goetz, which subverted expectations for yet another costume drama, and, in a similar spirit to Hellman’s play, turned out to be a brutal depiction of money and contempt. By looking back on Goetz and Hellman, is the Gate setting a new trend for interpreting the American playbook? (This blog expects a production of Close Harmony - Dorothy Parker and Elmer Rice’s dark comedy of sad New York suburbia - to follow).
Goetz and Hellman came of age during the 1920s, when the flapper generation danced in jazz clubs, followed their sexual inclinations, and drove to transcend the limitations of previous generations. These fashionable young characters were so likeable in Gate plays, seen in Noël Coward comedies like The Vortex and Private Lives, that, when the theatre encouraged audiences to show up to The Great Gatsby dressed as flappers, few needed persuading.
With an outspokenness characteristic of that era, Hellman railed against the hardships of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Her debut play The Children’s Hour shows how a dangerous rumour - exposing a relationship between lesbian teachers at a boarding school - can easily catch fire in the socially conservative climate of that decade. In 1936’s Days to Come, a gang of criminals exploit a labour dispute between a factory owner and his laid off employees.
Others may sooner recall the wartime dramas, such The Watch on the Rhine, a drawing room play about a German couple visiting relatives, and who get blackmailed by a dinner guest who turns out to be Nazi conspirator. Or possibly The Searching Wind, a portrait of a U.S. diplomat in Europe who fails to recognise the rise of fascism. Unsurprisingly, Hellman was a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, founded by Dorothy Parker.
Such plays may resonate today for obvious reasons, but The Little Foxes has gained urgency from recent events. At its centre is the aristocrat Regina, staking a claim to her brothers’ business deal to build a cotton mill. Desperate to come up with her investment, she stoops to new lows, manipulating her ill husband and loving daughter for her own ends.
What’s unsettling is the anatomy of corrupt capitalism that forms, the sad story of how Regina’s brothers seized control of the cotton mill plantation, and suppressed the town’s black population. “The world’s open for people like you and me. We’ll own this country some day,” says one brother, delivering a grim vision of corporate takeover.
In this era of restructuring, as we face into the cold void of another recession, The Little Foxes isn't likely to lose its teeth.
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