Writer: Edward Albee
Director: Mike Tweddle
There aren’t enough stars in the galaxy sufficient to praise this muscular but exquisitely nuanced production of Albee’s most celebrated, immersive and often psyche-draining drama. It bristles and bludgeons, seethes and salves with spellbinding humanity and visceral raw emotion.
Director Mike Tweedle, in his programme notes, recalls Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf being described as both ‘electrifying’ and akin to ‘bloodsports’. This adaptation suggests he had elicited from this incandescent cast something akin to hooking up an amphetamine charged abattoir to the National Grid. From the outset, the text is complex, dense and demanding. Albee is renowned for strictly following phrasing, nuance and timing.
Albee establishes the single set scene as ‘the living room of a house on the campus of a small New England college.’ Designer Liz Ascroft crafts a spacious room, distinctive in being floor-to-high-ceiling shelved with countless books. Two astute young ladies during the main interval comment with amusement about there being no access ladders or steps. Astute indeed, for there’s every reason that Ascroft and Tweedle aim to tease this near full house matinee as to why this construct is so inaccessible. Suggestive of George’s frustrated academic career, perhaps, something that Martha takes repeated and caustic relish in reminding him of. And of Matthew Pidgeon’s stage-commanding George? Be astonished, be afraid, just be there.
It is two o’clock in the morning, the historic drunken enmity between George and Martha palpably evident as they crash and stumble returning home from yet another interminable Saturday night campus cocktail evening. But things are only warming up. Act One is entitled Fun and Games, the text oozing lyrical venom and lethal irony. Acts Two and Three, respectively Walpurgisnacht and The Exorcism. The clue is in the titles.
Martha berates George for not name-checking the Bette Davis film in which she exclaims, ‘What a dump’. (Beyond The Forest, Dir. King Vidor, 1949). Perhaps she’d be better quoting Davis’ ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be bumpy night’ (All About Eve, Dir, J. L. Mankiewicz). Then, impressionable campus newcomers, the young couple, career-focused Nick and aptly named ingenue, Honey, arrive. What could possibly go wrong? This matinee audience suitably fastening their collective emotional seatbelts, preparing for a rollercoaster ride on a one-way ticket descent into alcohol Armageddon and psyche slasher Hades.
Like the wedding guest unable to detach himself from the vice-like narrative grip of the Ancient Mariner, Nick and Honey are compelled to bear witness to this marital gloves-off sparing game. Games that turn from brittle forced amusement into verbal carnage. Why don’t they just leave? Even worse – so far at least – Honey, a light-weight drinker by any standards, let alone those of George and Martha’s, is caning the brandy big time. But, and it is a serious kick in the butt, they are not all sweetness and innocence themselves, rather both catalyst and collateral – parallels with the aforementioned Mariner. After tonight’s psycho pyrotechnics, they may well be doomed to continue George and Martha’s curse. Unlike them, however, they demonstrate little or any of the latter’s fundamental humanity, whatever its often fractured and inchoate manifestation. The real-life combustible combination of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor transferred to the film set the bar (ahem!) very high indeed. Time to move over, Liz and Dick – there’s New Kids on the block.
Katy Stephens’ exceptional take on Martha will soon be going upstairs to slip out of her Chinese motif print cocktail gown into something more comfortable. Returning subsequently in a study in scarlet harlot with razor slash lipstick and ‘take me any which way but goose’ red stilettos. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a humpy night indeed. Napalm cocktails, anyone?
Nick (Ben Hall), everything Albee could ever have wanted, is perfect jealous sex bait for Martha’s gathering war-chest to attack George. By now, the terms have been agreed in this grotesque game of attrition: Leah Haile’s Honey may not quite be the innocent cutie she affects – was her rapidly disappearing ‘hysterical pregnancy’ a shotgun marriage entrapment on Nick’s part? Plot spoilers notwithstanding, this suspicion is not lost on either Martha or George – more poignantly with Martha as the denouement unravels with harrowing intensity. This time, she has gone too far: transgressed the sacred tabooed rule – don’t mention their son.
Act Three opens with Martha sloping and slurring about the front row stalls in as much a fugue of mental disintegration as intoxication. She declares her devotion to George and, with an inspired piece of endearing affectation, she uses her shoe as a telephone and conducts a confessional and berating monologue to her father.
As if they haven’t already, the pin-drop-silenced audience has guessed the worst. With her foetal crouch accentuated by her primal scream, George’s ‘Total War’ Pyrrhic vitriolic victory over Martha rings desperately hollow. Both now bathed in a single beam of overhead spotlight as if a Pentecostal tongue of cathartic flame – he embraces her. (Ashley Bale’s Lighting Design always giving more with less.)
‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Martha?’ ‘I am.’ Their houses of straw and sticks have been huffed and puffed down. They have no bricks enough to construct an illusion that can keep truth and reality at bay. Only each other. The wolf was never really outside the door at all. He was always from within. Even love won’t tear them apart. An astonishing piece of unmissable stagecraft. Do anything legal and remaining dressed to get hold of the very generously priced tickets.
Runs until 7 March 2026
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