Dystopian Britain: Government decrees foxes the enemies of the people

Foxfinder at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, from October 25-29. Review by JON LEWIS

Dawn King’s brilliant, award-winning play Foxfinder is even more relevant than when it emerged at the tiny Finborough Theatre in London in 2011. Watching Alistair Nunn’s Ronin Theatre revival at the Old Fire Station, the audience sees how a country is made to believe something preposterous. This adherence to a false belief leads to citizens to accept totalitarian conditions.

In a dystopian Britain, the government has decreed that foxes are the enemies of the people. Foxes have special, magical powers. Land and landscapes are searched for signs of ‘the beast’ and absence is evidence of presence. A cadre of black-clad modern-day witch hunters known as foxfinders has been trained up in special schools from an early age to terrorise the populace into compliance with the state ideology. A 19-year-old foxfinder, William (Niall McDaid), who has never even seen or heard a fox, is sent on his fourth mission to a lonely farm where recent crop failures suggest to the regime that foxes may be to blame.

With echoes of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Robin Hardy’s 1973 film The Wicker Man, William’s brainwashed beliefs struggle against the observable reasons for the farm’s disastrous crop failure. Truth, however logical, is rejected in favour of state-enforced fairy tales alluding to the cunning nature of the fox.

William is an unwanted guest investigating farmers Samuel Covey (Ashley Hunt) and his wife Judith (Layla Katib). They are grieving after the tragic drowning of their only son in floodwaters on the farm. It was the same floods that devastated the crops. Their farmer neighbour Sarah (Lizzie Dewar), however, does not believe in the destructive abilities of foxes, and tries to radicalise Judith against the foxfinder.

As in the Crucible, the innocent are victimised, and friends and family are pressured to give evidence against each other. King subtly undermines the foxfinder’s certainties by suggesting his immaturity for the job, not least in his hopeless, and unprofessional infatuation with Judith. The myth about foxes is a potent metaphor today for a Russian regime that casts Ukrainians as Nazis and the West as satanists. An excellent production.