Like Strindberg’s Dance of Death, Edward Albee’s masterful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? delves into embittered marital gamesmanship. In both plays, an older couple feed each other’s mutual pathologies and devour their visitors. Get the host turns into get the guest.
Audiences will be familiar with Mike Nichols’s abiding film version, though it lingered on the sexual dalliances and many of the George’s musings on eugenics were cut from the screenplay.
Martha, Albee tells us, is 52, a ‘boisterous woman’, ‘ample, but not fleshy’. She’s married younger – 46-year-old George in the history department, ‘thin, hair growing grey’. Her father is president of the university. “There are easier things,” sighs George.
After a faculty party, a newly-wed and newly arrived-in-town couple, the hapless ingénue Honey married (we discover for her daddy’s money) to the strapping, “good-looking” Nick – he’s in the biology department you see – join George and Martha at home for more booze.
During the course of a drunken evening, overbearing Martha and withered George ridicule and demean one another. Albee’s pithy script is full of one-line stingers and ripostes that draw blood. As George puts it, “it isn’t the prettiest spectacle…seeing a couple of middle-age types hacking away at each other”.
But Nick quickly learns to play. He accepts Martha’s blatant swooning, but soon finds in the second act – entitled Walpurgisnacht – he has miscalculated. He and Honey are the clumsy witnesses to a metaphorical murder, in danger of treading the same path. Martha and George at some point did love each other. To sustain their relationship they imagined a child, a kind of allegory for what was good between them – “the one thing I’ve tried to carry pure and unscathed through the sewer of this marriage” cries Martha. But when Martha oversteps the line with yet another sexual humiliation, George decides to kill their son.
Little has dated or dented the script, though Albee has returned to this theme in his most recent and equally masterful play, The Goat – or Who is Sylvia? There is a certain point of betrayal where something breaks and nothing will ever be the same, despite regrets, despite remorse.
A testament to the script is that when first performed in 1963 Arthur Hill won the Tony Award for best actor in the part of George, and the recent revival of the play on Broadway earned Bill Irwin the same accolade. Having seen this recent revival of Who’s Afraid on Broadway, with Kathleen Turner and Irwin, I had hoped that our own accomplished team of Fiona Ramsay (Martha) and Sean Taylor (George) slogging at each other under the veteran directorship of Janice Honeyman, promised to compare favourably. There is no reason why not.
However, shortly after curtain up, I began to feel I was about to be force-fed parochial pie for the next three hours. But it’s a superbly constructed play and worth hearing for that alone.
Albee’s characters are emotionally complex and the acerbic dialogue, for all its boldness, is subtle. The problem is that there is little grasp of the type of people, the East board American intellectual, academic and socialite classes, Albee is portraying. The production team don’t understand the characters. The script is bullied for laughs; the performance without nuance.
The opening exchanges between George and Martha were disappointing. The accents are too brassy. Martha is boisterous, but not as excessively vulgar, heavily made-up and slatternly as Janice Honeyman seems to have directed. The first impression is that we’re in for a night of watching the Cheap-Laughs at home or some sitcom version of Albee’s play. In one directorial liberty, kinky red lingerie is discovered behind a couch pillow. She jumps on chairs in her high heels, glass in hand, ranting. Later on, she’s about to give George a blowjob on stage.
Sean Taylor’s George lacks playfulness and irony. He is sour when he should be dry; raging instead of cunning. When Martha says he makes her puke, George’s reply – that it’s not a very nice thing to say – is delivered as if he’s freshly wounded. Nor can you imagine him having any kind of intellectual life. The script is clear about his bookishness, which makes Martha’s henpecking and George’s academic failure all the more poignant. After all, they debate the subtle difference between abstract, abstruse and recondite. Instead, we get a stack of National Geographic magazines sitting on a coffee table.
The younger couple fare worse. Erica Wessels’s Honey is no more than a caricature from someone else’s farce. The character is already so written up by Albee that to come across plausibly a restrained approach is needed. Nicholas Pauling’s Nick is too slight, without the crucial swagger we need from him. Pauling is cocky enough, but frequently looks terrified. Nick is often unsure, never chicken. We hardly feel he poses an adulterous threat to George. It’s all rather forced, and there is little understanding of the supporting dynamic the script requires.
However – and this is not the reviewer trying to sugar coat a bitter pill – the production manages to arrive in the third act. It really is worth the wait. Albee’s powerful dramatic engine kicks in in the third act entitled The Exorcism. Taylor uses an effective rictus-faced laugh and perfectly honed timing gained from a life on the stage.
Ramsay is a redoubtable and skilful actress; despite her part being demeaned by some unfortunate choices in the interpretation, she manages to create deep sympathy for her characterisation. In the final laconic exchange with Martha, George asks: “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “I am, George, I am.”
The conclusion is as powerful and as touching as any headlining production I have seen.
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