Reviews

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Sheffield)

Editorial Staff

On the evening following Elizabeth Taylor’s death it was particularly appropriate to find the armed combat between George and Martha as powerful as ever in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 45 years after Burton and Taylor starred in the film version. It strikes me in hindsight as remarkable that the play was ever staged on Broadway. Three weighty acts consume almost three hours of stage-time with very little action beyond the odd attempted strangulation, attentive listening demanded throughout – and this a first full-length play from a playwright hitherto unproduced on Broadway! Maybe someone realised it’s a masterpiece!

The plot, such as it is, is widely remembered. George, a History professor at a New England university, and his wife Martha return home early in the morning from a social function hosted by her father, the college president. She, it turns out, has invited back a new young member of the faculty and his wife. As night moves towards dawn, George and Martha strip every layer off their failing marriage, while smugly conventional Nick and his timid wife Honey provide an audience and occasional victims, as in the game of Get the Guests (which I can remember being replayed, with much less venom, over many a late-night drink in the 1960s).

This is all true as far it goes, but there is much more to Virginia Woolf than that. It ends up as the dissection of two marriages, not one, and the infinite subtlety of the construction allows for constant shifting of alliances (men v women, hosts v guests, Nick v George with Martha a floating cheerleader, everyone v everyone else) and a control of tone by which a sort of heightened naturalism melds into solo arias, most effectively in Martha’s blighted paean to George early in Act 3, superbly delivered by Sian Thomas.

Erica Whyman’s production for the Crucible and Northern Stage approaches these complexities with an unhurried confidence, beautifully paced in the ensemble sections, well at home in Soutra Gilmour’s elegant campus house set. Sian Thomas and Jasper Britton give contrasted, but complementary, performances, she very physical, unashamedly coarse, from the start her delivery full of alcoholic agony or (rather worse) invented optimism, he rumpled and intellectual, every sentence a tribute to the parenthesis. Their relationship is by turn wildly entertaining (never forget what a funny play Virginia Woolf is), desperately self-destructive and, finally, oddly touching.

As Nick John Hopkins radiates a mix of priggishness and sensible social comment, campus conformity and stifling correctness, while at the same time being irresistibly drawn outside his comfort zone in word and deed. Honey, as played by Lorna Beckett, constantly raises laughs, then stills them in unease. In their own way the young people have problems as great as those of George and Martha. So far they can control them, keep their secrets, skate on the thin ice of Nick’s veneer of confidence, but for how long?