There is no shortage of conviction in this revival of Lillian Hellman’s southern American classic about a greedy, feuding, family and the torment of a woman’s ambition within it. When one actor fainted a few minutes into the play on opening night, the cast reconvened to begin again within the hour.
But the ideas behind the production, directed by Lyndsey Turner, do not coalesce quite so well. It takes us faithfully through the story of the scheming Regina (Anne-Marie Duff) who, with her equally grasping brothers, Ben (Mark Bonnar) and Oscar (Steffan Rhodri), seeks to raise the investment for a cotton mill deal that requires the consent of her dying, and unwilling, husband, Leo (Stanley Morgan).
The set design, by Lizzie Clachan, moves this turn of the 20th-century story to a 1950s or 60s era drawing room, as bland as a boardroom. This modernisation butts up against mentions of the civil war, horse-drawn carts and the sense of a fin de siècle aristocratic order giving way to capitalist venality.
It also leaves unanswered questions over what the production is seeking to do and say: that the life choices for southern women remained narrow well into the 20th century? That the Civil Rights Movement hadn’t reached the south by this time (it certainly seems the case from the nervous Black servants played by Andrea Davy and Freddie MacBruce). Or something else? It is all guesswork.
Duff has an uncanny physical resemblance to Bette Davis, who memorialised the part of the imperiously disgruntled wife in the 1941 film (and was originally played by Tallulah Bankhead on stage two years earlier). Her Regina is less coolly haughty and more a fighter, her scheming ruthless, her manner pugnacious at times, perhaps because of her desperation to escape the trap of her marriage and family home. Every other woman here is trapped, from Oscar’s brow-beaten southern aristocrat wife, Birdie (Anna Madeley), to Regina’s daughter, Alexandra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who is warned she will become just as resigned as her aunt.
But it is too slow and static, turning Hellman’s masterpiece into a workman-like production. You do not feel a change of emotional temperature, only the turning cogs of the plot. The scheming around financial percentages and investments is like a business meeting that goes on for too long, and the human drama beneath – the jostling for power and advantage-seeking between siblings – does not quite find its footing.
The key scene in which Leo struggles with a heart attack as Regina coldly watches on is filled with a terrible clarity but the play’s other shocks and stings do not deliver as they should. There are powerful isolated moments instead: “What a greedy girl you are. You want so much of everything,” says Ben to Regina, a menacing presence with a smooth front that breaks into explosiveness. Regina is not only a villain but a victim too, cut out of her father’s will so that her brothers control the family fortune, and with a financially timorous husband who has been unable to fulfil her life ambitions.
The ending leaves her isolated as a punishment for her ambition. Do you feel compassion for her as a woman out of her time, or condemn her for her grasping? I’m not sure the play has decided how to navigate between the two.
