Finding the Sun/Marriage Play

Synopsis

Finding the Sun (1983) - Four couples arrive on a Long Island beach for privileged conservatives. Daniel and Benjamin, once lovers but now married to Abigail and Cordelia, still long to be together. In a series of short scenes, Albee exposes the pain and dark comedy at the heart of this arrangement. Marriage Play (1987) - is a portrait of a married couple in crisis. Jack and Gillian are characterised with Albee's usual wit, poetry and unsparing insight.

Our Review:

9 May 2001

The National's faulty new writing policy is revealed in this bizarre resurrection of two slight one acters by Edward Albee, written in the 1980s, virtually forgotten, but now receiving their British premiere here.

The now 73-year-old playwright - still best known for one of his earliest plays, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, written in 1961 - had a late career recovery with the heavily autobiographical Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women some three decades later, but in between those two landmarks, came only A Delicate Balance and many a dead-end dramatic detour. These two short plays hail, alas, from that long in-between period; and while it's always tempting to reclaim some of a newly popularised playwright's more neglected works, this kind of pandering does him, and us, no favours. The first play, Marriage Play, is another re-run of Virginia Woolf's warring central couple, George and Martha, this time ...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 31 July 2001:

Some nights in the theatre are just entertaining without the actual plays having to be works of art. The dialogue was sharp, the acting involving, and despite the plays both having no real direction they were certainly not boring to watch. Whether the National should have been putting them on or not is a different question. An enjoyable evening, and one that stimulated discussion between myself and my fellow theatre-goers. Worth the money then....

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