The Little Foxes

A huge staircase without a balcony dominates the set of Perth Theatre's The Little Foxes, and it doesn't take much detective work to guess that someone's going to come a cropper in spectacular fashion, at least metaphorically, before the end of the play.

Lillian Hellman's melodrama, first performed in 1939, has some of the ingredients for a compelling morality tale - greed, deception, power - but only its secondary characters appear to have hearts. Siblings Regina, Ben and Oscar Hubbard are such irredeemably ruthless people that it's difficult to care which of them comes out on top.

Ian Grieve's production gets off to a shaky start, with cinematic music blaring. The cast struggle to get to grips with their Southern accents, and while Neil McKinven as Ben and Deirdre Davis as Birdie go on to give strong individual performances, the tone of the production remains uneven and scenes that should be gripping feel limp.

Irene Macdougall takes the lead role of Regina, a woman whose cold-hearted treatment of men can be traced back to her father's betrayal. The actress conveys the right combination of outward confidence and inward desperation, but ultimately there's little humanity to be found in a woman who will literally stop at nothing in her pursuit of wealth.

As revelations and counter-revelations cause the balance of power to see-saw in the closing scenes, the play's more interesting characters - Regina's emotionally scarred daughter, and her abused, disillusioned sister-in-law - fade into the shadows.

There's little to be learned from this heavy-handed morality tale, and Perth Theatre's production is insufficiently melodramatic to make it particularly entertaining, either.