Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a misunderstood masterpiece
This article is more than 7 years oldMichael BillingtonThe film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, led Edward Albee’s play to be remembered as a boozy marital slugfest. But it is as much about America itself
Edward Albee occasionally expressed exasperation at being forever identified as the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “The play,” he wrote in a programme note to the 1996 Almeida production, “has hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort.”
Yet Albee exercised fierce control over all productions. I was recently told of a brilliant British actor who was summoned to Albee’s New York apartment for a reading of the play prior to an intended Broadway production with Patti LuPone. Albee’s mounting dismay at the British actor’s textual quibbles meant that, by the end of a long afternoon, all hopes of the production had been abandoned.
Albee’s protective attitude to his play stemmed in part, I suspect, from the fact that it is widely misunderstood. The searing Mike Nichols 1966 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, stamped it in the public mind as a liquor-fuelled marital slugfest. But the play, I am convinced, is as much about the state of the Union as about marriage. Albee was a deeply political writer who once told me he liked plays to be “useful, not merely decorative”. It is also significant that he wrote the play in the early 1960s when America was slowly emerging from the narcoleptic Eisenhower years and when a fragile Cold War peace depended on the balance of terror.
It was Howard Davies’s magnificent Almeida production that fully awoke me to the fact that the play, apart from being about the stock American theme of truth and illusion, has even wider resonance. George and Martha, whose marathon battles we watch with appalled fascination, derive their names from the Washingtons. They live in a college at New Carthage which evokes a classically ruined civilisation. Unable to face reality, George himself is a historian who, while his wife is busy humping the guest, curls up with Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Meanwhile Nick, who gets laid by Martha, is a biologist credited with a chromosome-alteration scheme that will produce perfect future specimens.
Albee’s play embraces not only history and science but even religion in that Nick’s father-in-law was a travelling preacher who managed to reconcile God and Mammon. We only think about this later. While watching the play we are hypnotised by the spectacle of a couple tearing each other apart.
I was lucky enough to have caught the first London production in 1964 and my chief memory is of Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill starting on the lightest of notes before descending into Walpurgisnacht. Diana Rigg, playing Martha as an intelligent woman haunted by self-disgust, and David Suchet’s George, hiding his disappointment behind a sardonic exterior, were equally unforgettable in the 1996 Almeida revival. And in 2006 Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, in a West End revival directed by Anthony Page, showed there are no games without pain: I always recall Irwin slamming the door-chimes in agony as he realised Martha and Nick were about to retire upstairs.
Rumour has it that Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill are to star in a new London production. With America currently engaged in its own form of post-truth politics, now seems the perfect time to revive Albee’s enduring masterpiece about the danger of living in a world of illusions.
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