(seen at the afternoon performance on 25th January 2025)
The monkey was just that bit too young in 1982 to have caught the last West End production of Lillian Hellman’s play. It starred Elizabeth Taylor, no less... and was a financial disaster following poor reviews.
So, first time chance to see it – after a ‘false start’ a couple of weeks ago when the performance (and subsequently entire week) was cancelled due to cast illness. After negotiating the bizarre box office system to get a replacement ticket (they won’t sell tickets by phone at the box office?!), it can report it was worth the effort.
Apparently a biblical reference to vulpine spoiling vines, this twisted tale of siblings and greed in 1900 Alabama has gathered very little dust over a century and a quarter, feeling all too relevant still today - "Dragon's Den" fans will recognise weirdly more than the odd moment.
Benjamin (Mark Bonnar), Regina (Anne-Marie Duff) and Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) are selling an interest in the family firm. Well, the men are – Regina doesn’t count as she is missing something vital... cash to invest. Her husband Horace (John Light) has plenty held in bonds in a bank safe box, but he is absent.
He returns to find that the brothers, with idle son Leo (Stanley Morgan) – handily a bank clerk with access to the box – have looted it. Death allows a sister her revenge.
Designer Lizzie Clachan opts for a beige, 1930s look apartment. Upmarket but curiously lit by Lucy Carter to give everything a bilious tinge, or maybe deliberate given the subject matter.
Sound designer Tingying Dong sadly doesn’t cope with the speed of Southern accents in the first scene, and allows Phillipe Cato’s appropriate score to overshadow the dialogue at times.
Both are vital in this emotionally verbal play. Most noticeably, Anne-Marie Duff’s experience when speaking with daughter Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) demonstrates just how intricate the text is.
As Duff fires, Worthington-Cox struggles to return, precisely illustrating the relationship. We need to hear every word as well as watch a child quail. Duff is magnificent, Worthington-Cox takes her moments playing piano and later delivering devastating news.
Anna Madeley is the third woman in the family. Oscar’s wife Birdie is exactly that. Timid and flapping, until her own surprising moment in the spotlight.
The men are mostly rotten, the actors clearly relishing the drama. Senior plotter Benjamin allows Bonnar to portray a man thinking too fast for his own good.
He has to, however, as Rhodri gives brother Oscar a Woody Allen style of intelligent buffoonery, in neat dovetail with Morgan’s dangerously greedly and stupid son.
That John Light manages to implode the trio with quiet understatement impresses. His earlier turn as industrialist business partner elect William Marshall is also strong, creepily so, in line with the morals of his potential fellow investors.
Notes too for household help Addie (Andrea Davy) and Cal (Freddie MacBruce). The former possibly the only emotionally moral adult person in the apartment, with a wonderfully tender scene with her dying employer. The latter also has excellent timing in two key plot moments, his bafflement at the unlikely but inventive developments keenly judged.
This is a proper old-fashioned Broadway play. You can either accept it at face value – an entertaining story of family rivalry; or you can read far more into it. Hellman hated the problems that came with money, the position of women in society and the lack of future she perceived for them. Giving a vixen the ability to bite rewards us, as does the Young Vic with such a worthwhile revival.
4 stars.