I confess I am a sucker for a love story. Who isn’t, if secretly? But Keith Scott, writer and director of The Fox, asserts, ‘This is not a love story’. He points out that David Herbert Lawrence eschewed love, except of the kind he himself recognised, rejecting romance and sentimentality.

Yet one is aware from the first moodily atmospheric scene, a woman’s twilight encounter with a fox too moving, too beautiful, to kill, that this is indeed a love story. Not, perhaps, for the three troubled characters on the stage, but between writer/director Scott and this curious novella by Lawrence.

Lawrence surely owes Scott a debt of gratitude for rescuing his story from the salacious treatment meted out to it in the 1967 film version, not to mention the 1981 stage play. The plot is simple: two women, sturdy Nellie March and frail Jill Banford, struggle to run a small farm after the First World War, when food and men are both hard to come by. Their hens are not laying, disturbed by a bold fox that attacks at night. Attempts to shoot the fox have failed. Then one evening a young man, a soldier, appears at their door, and they allow him to stay. To the dismay of Jill, he proposes to Nellie.

So, difficult decisions to be made, and that fox still to be dealt with. It is easy to see how a film industry with an eye to the Box Office would omit Lawrence’s fancy language, and twist this into a tale of a shameful lesbian relationship shattered by potent male sexuality. In fact, Lawrence, author of banned and infamous Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and a man who did not exactly shy away from sex in any form, orthodox or no, describes these women only as ‘good friends’, or ‘the best of friends’.

So kudos to Keith Scott, who has successfully undertaken such massive tasks as rewriting Schiller’s Mary Stuart, and Shakespeare’s Richard II, for applying his scholarship as well as his stagecraft to The Fox and producing something that should certainly appease Lawrence’s ghost. Scott has discarded unnecessary characters, rearranged the scenes for better dramatic flow, used as much as possible of the original dialogue in the novella, and employed such devices as soliloquy to express the characters’ thoughts. Or rather, Lawrence’s thoughts, anxious as he always is to plumb philosophical depths, through symbolism and metaphor. 

It is inspiring to be part of a passion project, as audience or crew, and Scott’s enthusiasm and knowledge, developed over ten years of painstaking research, is evident in every aspect of the Globe’s production, resulting in an absorbing tale of dangerously intertwined relationships and male/female power dynamics.

The set (Scott with Ray Fleury) is cosily realistic, well suited to the Globe – the kitchen living space of the small farmhouse in 1918, with thoughtful details revealing postwar hardship and the need to make-do. It’s attractive though, as Lawrence describes it, with leadlight window and half-timbered walls separating the room from a roughly fenced outdoor area, and a sense of the farm beyond. Soft lighting and convincing sound (Scott with Brian Byas and Phillip Todd) enhance the effect, most impressively in the dangerous tree-felling climax.

It is a tremendous advantage to have the wardrobe in the hands of the experienced and highly accomplished Charmian Smith (with collaboration by Scott again!) All the costumes are authentic and appropriate to period and character, but the transformational power of theatre shines out when Nellie discards her manlike work clothes. We are as spellbound as Henry at her appearance in a beautiful, impeccably-styled blue-green frock of the era, all her feminine qualities suddenly revealed. 

Scott’s young cast strive to realise his vision. Maegan Stedman-Ashford as the central character, Nellie March, conveys an intriguing brooding intensity even before the dramatic entry of the soldier who will disrupt their lives, and that, combined with the rapt fascination she feels for the fox, hints at unfulfilled depths. Her character has the most interesting arc, her metaphysical musings most closely aligned with Lawrence’s own, and Stedman-Ashford successfully builds our suspense as to her feelings and intentions.

Caitlin Gordon, playing her companion Jill Banford, whose father has provided the funds for the farm as he considers neither woman has a chance at marriage any more, is perhaps just too young to convincingly show a tired and faded woman who is the clinging vine to Nellie’s sturdy oak. Gordon, moving quickly and speaking sharply, exudes an energy and vitality which does not seem in keeping with Lawrence’s repeated descriptions of Jill as weak, poor, little, fragile, plaintive, with ‘tiny iron breasts’, her hair turning grey although she and Nellie are barely thirty. Nevertheless, Gordon provides the necessary vigour to move the play along.

Thomas Downing is the intruder, Henry Grenfel, barely twenty but intensely male. Now a soldier stationed on Salisbury Plain, he had run away to Canada from the farm when it was owned by his grandfather, and subsequently fought in the Great War. Although Nellie sees him as the fox, Lawrence more often likens him to a cat or puppy, and Downing does indeed convey a youthful cocky impudence under a courteous if cunning exterior.

Scott has shown great skill and sympathy in interpreting the novella, especially in the lyrical passages describing the glowing red fox, the lone deer, and even the terrified hens. Lawrence’s feeling for the natural world, for our interaction with its beasts in particular, is undeniably powerful, and I forgive him much for a poem that has resonated with me all my life: Snake. At first humbled and honoured by its beauty as the snake drinks at his water-trough, on impulse the speaker clumsily throws a stick at it, only to realise almost at once that ‘I have something to expiate: a pettiness’. If only Lawrence would recognise that same pettiness in his observations of women!

For naturally his beliefs on the power balance between the sexes pervade his story – frankly it makes my blood boil to read lines like: “He wanted her to commit herself to him, to put her independent spirit to sleep. He wanted to make her submit, yield…take away her consciousness and make her just his woman. Just his woman.” 

Keith Scott however has thankfully presented us with a Nellie who is less passive, despite the silent musing she is prone to, and hopefully less likely to succumb to Henry’s misogynistic view of marriage. Although much of Lawrence’s mystical language is retained in the concluding speeches, Scott has added a final line, deliberately giving a more hopeful ending, desperately needed in these our own times, when power at the highest levels is so abused.

An intellectual friend of mine says their favourite Lawrence anecdote is Katherine Mansfield peeping through his kitchen window to see Lawrence and wife Frieda dancing naked, marigolds adorning their private parts…I could wish The Fox showed more of that exuberant joy, and am grateful to Scott not only for giving us this chance to experience an absorbing work by one of the greatest influences on modern English literature, but also lightening the message a little. And thank you, Globe for a unique and memorable event. 

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