Who’s afraid of Downton’s Lady Cora? You will be now...
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (Ustinov Studio, Bath)
Verdict: Long and louche with small reward ★★★✩✩
FOR me, the pleasures of Edward Albee’s notorious marital slugfest are a well buried mystery. Every production of his 1962 drama about a middle-aged couple serving each other seven helpings of hell seems a kind of theatrical task force: an archaeological expedition hoping to solve its enigma.
That mission in Bath now falls to Elizabeth McGovern (Lady Cora in Downton) and Dougray Scott, the Scottish actor known as Ray Lennox in Irvine Welsh’s ITV series Crime.
McGovern plays Martha, the dipso daughter of a wealthy university president. Scott plays her defeated, no less boozy history professor husband. To their lair in fictional New Carthage they lure a young, not yet jaundiced couple to bear witness to their bizarre mind games, in which they taunt and ridicule each other.
When Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton took the roles in Mike Nichols’s 1966 film there was a real
sense of mutually assured destruction. Their performance was a kind of domestic Cuban Missile Crisis.
And here again the gloves come off, as the childless duo are mercilessly foul to each other, take lazy potshots, detonate emotional IEDs and go thermonuclear, by exposing each other’s most intimate secrets. And all this is rendered as a sodden, through-the-night drinking bender which descends into pseudoreligious Latin babble, in a three and a half hour theatrical marathon.
But what, really, is the point? Where is the fun? Albee’s vicious domestic drama hails from a period that relished taking down what it saw as middle- class illusions. There is a fair bit of creaky Freudian psychology and, at one point, the playwright seems to forecast the end of Western civilisation.
McGovern revels in the psychological mess of her high-maintenance daddy’s girl. Wearing sleek 1960s fashions, she looks like a spider (or perhaps a mummy-long-legs) with a bottle blonde rug on top: a scuttling alpha female with a filthy mouth and a nasty mind, concealed behind an exoskeleton of social graces.
Scott is a cardiganed prof rendered beige by his day job. Measured and bespectacled, he affects a drawl somewhere between Gore Vidal and Richard Nixon.
He pretends he doesn’t mind being a doormat, but he is savagely disappointed in himself and this domestic warfare helps him feel more alive.
There is chemistry between McGovern and Scott, but I’m not sure they fully let rip with Albee’s invective. They make it sound plausible, rather than raucous.
There is also a strong sense of what psychologists call co-dependency, where the two main characters’ bickering feels like a safe space. But still it’s hard to know what’s in it for us, the audience. Maybe the small pleasure of vicariously exorcising long-held resentments?
The perspective of Gina Bramhill and Charles Aitken, as the younger couple temporarily trapped in this hell, affords the modest amusement of some social embarrassment. She is a secret lover of brandy who’s out of her depth; he is a buff biologist who falls short of McGovern’s hopes for him as a campus stud.
Nor does Paul Wills’s set give us many clues. It is a bohemian compound of compromised upholstery, mismatched rugs and books shoved under chairs.
And so, for all of the excellent work in Lindsay Posner’s production, digging down into this marital plague pit, the mystery of the play’s attraction, for me at least, remains unsolved.