Two well-to-do but dysfunctional families in America’s Deep South are competing for audiences a few miles apart at the moment. At the Young Vic, the director Lyndsey Turner is vainly trying to breathe life into Lillian Hellman’s creaking melodrama The Little Foxes . And, sad to say, Rebecca Frecknall, one of the most fashionable names around, has stumbled badly with Tennessee Williams’s simmering portrait of Big Daddy and his warring clan.
With Daisy Edgar-Jones, of Normal People and Twisters fame, playing the volcanic, sexually unfulfilled Maggie, the box office can expect to do good business, but this weirdly off-kilter production, alternately ponderous and manically overheated, could almost be a parody of Williams’s gothic manner. As in Frecknall’s other recent venture into this territory, the much-feted revival of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran, a musician has been crowbarred into the action. In Streetcar a jazz drummer clattered away in the background for reasons which weren’t entirely clear.
At the Almeida, we have to contend with a pianist who sits at one side, tapping out a series of dissonant chords which provide a sort of anti-muzak. As the play unfolds, the suspicion grows stronger that we may be expected to see the musician (Seb Carrington takes on the thankless role) as the ghost of Skipper, the deceased buddy of Maggie’s alcoholic husband, Brick..
