Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
Liverpool Playhouse (23/04/05)
It
is grossly unfair when new productions of old classics are forever
seen in the light of their apparently definitive forebears. At the
same time there is an inevitability about it. In the case of Edward
Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it is the brilliant
quartet of Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy
Dennis in the 1966 film with whom the cast of the recent Liverpool
Playhouse production will not be able to escape comparison -- at least
initially.
This theatregoer
for one is delighted that within three minutes of the first entrance,
all his memories of Mike Nichols's film were unrepentedly swept aside.
Instantly I was transported into George and Martha's dysfunctional
world where fantasy and reality collide, and life is lived vicariously
(and escaped) through Bette Davis, handsome blondes and adolescent
sons who seem never to make an appearance. This was no sudden thrust
into a world with which I could not identify, however, for Ian
Bartholomew's bespectacled, balding George provided a charming and
sympathetic foil to Denise Black's drunken, hyperactive, but never
overacting Martha.
Homeboy Nick (Nick
Court) is the only moderately stable
character, unlike his irrepressibly hysterical and naive wife Honey
(Kaye Wragg). With such a parade of volatile characters on display, an
inferior cast would have overstepped the mark into caricature, and yet
the professional restraint here is admirable. I could be certain the
few in the audience who laughed at the wrong moments were simply
insensitive to the drama, rather than reacting to unintentional
hilarity into which the cast could so easily have slid. For all the
wittiness, and even the moments of broader comedy, the tension and
conflict was never less than believable.
Francis
O'Connor's set appears first as the exterior of George and Martha's
New-England cottage, which literally opens up to allow us inside the
living room, where the fun and games begin. The handsomely decorated
walls stretch up into the sky, where gradually the woodwork decays and
darkness takes over. The lighting by Natasha Chivers is subtle, but
remarkable: Night breaks seamlessly into day as the drama reaches its
climax.
At almost three
hours, and with a small cast, this is an incredibly demanding play to
execute successfully, but this is no bloody execution, the careful
script ending up in messy chunks of broad comedy on George and
Martha's carpet: In the skilled and meticulous hands of director Gemma
Bodinetz, Albee's bittersweet drama is given the impeccable treatment
it deserves.
