The Little Foxes and Left-Wing Playwrights at the Shaw Festival
Consider:
J. B. Priestley, a playwright Inspector Calls. One of Britain's leading radical socialists from the 1930s through the 1950s, a politician and as a writer. A founder of the Socialist Party, Common Wealth, even a little further left than the Labour Party. Top permanent wage controls, nationalization of industry and public ownership of land.
Lillian Hellman, playwright for The Little Foxes. More than a mere "fellow travellers." Open admired Stalin and his methods; indifferent to the efficient brutality with which he eliminated opponents; endorsed the Soviet occupations of Finland and Poland. Reiste to Russia in the late 1930s, while Stalin was deliberately starving millions of Ukrainians, found nothing in the Soviet Union to criticize and much to admire.
George Bernard Shaw, playwright to marry. Britain's leading socialist thinkers from 1890 until his death in 1950. Bewunderte Lenin, Stalin and Mussolini, praised the USSR On the other hand, UK participation in the two world wars. Not only promoted radical socialism, but through his plays attacked primarily cultural and economic institutions which hold England together: the Christian religion, the institution of marriage, private property, free enterprise system.
Leonard Bernstein, composer for Wonderful Town. The High Priest of the 60s radical chic. Notorious as uncritical supporters of left-wing causes during the 1960s, his high-society parties to collect money for the Black Panthers were lampooned by Tom Wolfe in his essay "Radical Chic These evenings."
Bernstein gets a pass because the script and the lyrics to the songs in Wonderful Town were other, because the music is wonderful, and it is difficult to find anything ideological in this wonderful musical (the Shaw production, of which I enthusiastically recommend) .
But Priestley, Hellman and Shaw plays positively burst with left Cannot. And Shaw's anti-capitalist Mrs. Warren's profession is not yet in the Shaw's festival season 2008!
If I took into account a playwright personal character and principles in deciding whether to see a piece that I had as The Little Foxes ball adoption. But the game had a high reputation, and we had enjoyed Hellman's Garden in the autumn Shaw a few years ago. This was the show at this year's Shaw Festival season, I was looking forward to most.
My how this woman hated our country! The Little Foxes is a rant against American capitalism and a barely disguised call for violent revolution.
In The Little Foxes who are already wealthy family Hubbard (Southern merchants and bankers) are trying to complete capital to build a cotton mill in their town. But the Hubbard brothers and their sister, we learn, like every bit as rapacious and corrupt as the French aristocracy before the French Revolution or the Russian nobility before the October Revolution of 1917. In Hellman object lesson that Hubbard, and the world of American economic and financial metropolis, they represent deserve the same fate as the ill-fated French and Russian aristocrats.
Let 's inventory of despicable characters in Hellman' s play:
The Hubbard were the children of slave owners, as well as many of the Russian aristocracy murdered by the communists in 1917 was in possession of Russian serfs. (The Little Foxes in 1939), but the story takes place in the deep south around 1900.) Hellman, Ben Hubbard, the offensive comment that his ageing cooking in the pasture, "if we are not already in possession of their mother."
The Hubbard brothers got rich as a trader fraud black people in basic food and goods collected by usurious interest. The Hubbard's plan to use their political muscle, probably through bribes to secure water rights for the new mill for nearly nothing.
Illustrating of classical Marxist propaganda point that capitalists grind the faces of the poor, by comparing them against each other, the Hubbard brothers brag that they will be able to maintain low wages in a new cotton by the poor whites against the blacks poor. They ensure their new business partners from Chicago that no trade union has admitted to a foothold in a cotton mill in their town.
An exquisite touch borrowed from Les Miserables: Just as the famous French aristocrats used to mantraps in their forests to maim farmers, could hunt small game to feed their hungry families, Oscar Hubbard goes hunting every morning in his private property and can spread his dead game on red, although malnourished urban dwellers have not had meat in months. He promises that the law against trespassers.
To help the audience identify the Hubbard siblings with the condemned French and Russian monarchy, Hellman sister behalf of the "Regina". This busy, fashion and money, as Marie Antoinette, it is the desire of the two strongest and most heartless of siblings. Regina will not hesitate to blackmail their own brothers, a graeres interest in the new cotton mill.
In one of the crudest play the scenes, Oscar Hubbard encouraged his own son, Leo, to steal a package of valuable bonds from a secure safe.
Reminds us of this monarchical inbred families: the Hubbard brothers and Regina connive to marry Leo to his 17-year-old first cousin, Alexandra. Fortunately, Alexandra Leo despised because of its cruelty to animals, including reasons.
When Oscar's wife, Birdie, warns the girl from the matchmaking plot ( "You do not see they'll make you marry him, Zan"), Oscar Strikes his wife - perhaps the most shocking scene in the play.
And at the end, how can the Hubbard brothers receive the money for the new cotton? Like all capitalists (Hellman), steal it!
Wife rackets, corrupters of children, animal-offenders, fraudsters, thieves, cheaters, and usurers, bribers, blackmailers, oppressor of the poor, enemies of the working man!
True to Marxist stereotype, Hellman ensure that the only characters in the game with any moral sense, the "oppressed" character. Oscar's ill-use of birdie his wife has beaten her and forced her to drink, but it still has enough spirit to be indignant about the way in their statutes "made their money charging station terribly interested in poor ignorant n *** S and fraud on what they bought. "Hubbard" black servant Addie, the moral center of the piece (as one would expect, a left-wing pieces), the moral justification for a class revolution:
Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people in the same way as in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat. (Quiet) Sometimes I think it is not right, watch them do it At the end .
Hellman's play, the Spunky recalls Alexandra Addie's remark, their youthful advantage muscles, and is to mount the barricades:
Addie said there were people who ate the earth and other people, stand around and watched them do it. And Uncle Ben said the same thing. (Gespannt) Well, tell him for me, Mama, I'm not to stand around and watch you do it. Tell him I will fight as hard as he had some struggles Place where people not only stand around and watch.
Hellman wants us to understand that the Hubbard are not just small-town types, but are cut from the same cloth as the wealthy industrialist tycoons of the day. Driving home the connection, they Ben Hubbard has appointed Henry Frick, the steel magnate (also a noted art collector) in a toast to the success of the cotton Venture:
It was Henry Frick, said: "Railroads are the Rembrandts of investments. "Well, I say," Southern Cotton Mills, the Rembrandt of investment.
The Little Foxes is a fundamentally dishonest play a defamation. Of course, it has always been sharp practice in the economy. But traders succeed on the merits by honest, live up to their contracts, and by giving customers what they promise. The industry was founded by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, Henry Ford and dramatically improves the lives of all Americans, and as philanthropists gave much of their wealth back into the public - may be the view, Henry Frick's Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Dycks in the Public Art Museum (The Frick Collection), he built on the Fifth Hellman Avenue.
Why not give us an honest picture of a representative part of the business world? It still could be a good game (as Harley Granville Barker's The Voysey Inheritance, made in the Shaw a few years ago, among many examples). But it never would have served their purpose. She knew that the revolution would never in America, unless the Americans came to view all capitalist, by Andrew Mellon down to the local cotton merchant, as useless, leeches, is not hopeless corrupt.
But The Little Foxes only one Portrait of an unusually corrupt (and colorful) Southern family? Many playgoers will see the play this simplistic terms. But that's not what Hellman intended. She wanted with their huge dramatic skills that nothing less than revolution was necessary to end the reign of the black-hearted capitalists - they told us - were raping America. She wanted us as a fellow revolutionaries.
The Hubbard are never brought to justice; to Hellman's belief, social justice will never come, in a capitalist society. Instead, it is her play ends with the young foxes still on the loose. Not by coincidence, Hellman leaves the task of them to bay, and the setting on the dogs to tear it into pieces, us.
Paul Britton
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