Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Playwright: Edward Albee Director: James Macdonald

Edward Albee’s modern classic – in which a late-night campus drinks party descends into the matrimonial equivalent of Dante’s Inferno – is the “most wickedly entertaining, most viciously nasty, most incrementally harrowing play in the American canon”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. And never before have I seen a production of it that “ticks all those boxes with such pen-breaking vigour”. Audience members have been politely asked not to eat during this “flawless” show, and I can see why: “there’s every danger of mid-show scoffers either choking to death as they’re seized by convulsive laughter, or disgorging the contents of their viscerally churned-up stomachs”.

This is one of those “rare occasions” when “play, performance and production” all coalesce “perfectly”, agreed Michael Billington in The Guardian. Imelda Staunton, who gives a typically “brilliant” turn as Albee’s “campus Medusa”, is not “one of your big, blowsy Marthas built on Elizabeth Taylor lines, but a pocket fighter”. She enjoys humiliating her apparently ineffectual husband, George, and relishes his few comebacks, yet it is in the final act – stripped of her warpaint and Mae West drawl – that she is at her “magnificent best”, revealing the full extent of Martha’s self-loathing and “desolate sadness”.

Staunton is sensational, agreed Susannah Clapp in The Observer. “When finally she roars with pain, it is as if a lioness has been shot.” Yet she’s matched blow for blow, slug for slug, by the “revelatory” Conleth Hill as underachieving history lecturer George. He’s caustic, funny, fatigued and out of shape; but “is he shambling or prowling”? There’s “beautifully shaded” work, too, from Imogen Poots and Luke Treadaway as the young couple who have “foolishly wandered into ringside seats for this exhibition fight”, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. Poots, in particular, gives a “masterclass” in drunk acting. James Macdonald’s production is the most “searing” account of Albee’s masterpiece I’ve seen on the London stage, said Matt Wolf in The New York Times. Albee, who died last September, would surely have approved.