A Bad Sister’s very good stage return

The Little Foxes
Young Vic, London, until February 8

Few, if any, actresses can communicate inner turmoil quite like Anne-Marie Duff and she’s in her element in Lyndsey Turner’s revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

Duff – last seen on screen in the second season of streaming hit Bad Sisters – plays a matriarch in a grand old mansion in the American deep south at the turn of the 20th century. Wth her loathsome brothers (played by Mark Bonnar and Steffan Rhodri), she is scheming to get money out of her dying, wheelchair-bound husband (Stanley Morgan) in order to fund a get-rich-quick business deal.

Lizzie Clachan’s set design evokes the place and the period well enough, and the actors make a generally good job of all the plotting, but Hellman’s play, considered daring when it first came out, now seems a little long-winded and a bit of judicious cutting wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Still, Duff holds the piece together, and, as the play reaches its climax and the extent of her ruthlessness becomes clear, she communicates very well the dark recesses of the human soul. A truly great actress.